 thank you for joining us today for this important panel discussion. As you know, electric power is fundamental to any modern economy and impacts our lives almost every minute of the day. The infrastructure, the electric grid, which is only about 120 years old, was considered by the National Academy of Engineering as the most important engineering achievement of the 20th century. But in the 21st century, the grid is changing due to a variety of reasons. Climate stresses, as we saw what happened in Texas, cybersecurity, electrification of transportation, which is a tectonic shift in the auto industry, renewables integration, renewables are the cheapest one of the cheapest ways to produce electricity, and the grid was never designed for it, and many others. We are also in a moment of history where we have a president, President Biden, who's focusing on climate change and has an ambitious goal of 100% clean power by 2035. Given this scenario, it is important to understand how the grid could be changed and what does electric power mean in the future. To understand these changes and how we should plan for the future, the National Academy has created a committee to dig deeper into this, which was led by Granger Morgan of Carnegie Mellon University. We have four distinguished members of this committee here to discuss the report and have a conversation with us. Anu Anaswamy from MIT, Su Tirani from Analysis Group, Deepak Devan from Georgia Tech, and Anjan Bose from Washington State University. We will first go through a presentation of the report, and then I'll have a conversation with the panel, followed by Liang Min, who is the Executive Director of Bits and Watts, to take audience questions. So let me hand over to the presentation by starting with Anu. Thank you, Anu. Thank you, Arun. We could go to the second slide. So as Arun pointed out, we are here to talk about this report, The Future of Electric Power in the United States, put out by the National Academies, and this was released in February of 2021. So before we go into the actual report itself, let me just tell you a little bit about the genesis, so if you could go to the next slide. So at the request of Congress, the Department of Energy asked the National Academies to basically evaluate what's the medium and long-term evolution of the electric grid, and they asked us to focus on technologies, planning and operations, business models, and grid architectures. And our first meeting was March of 2019, and we met several times, about maybe once every couple of months, leading all the way up to February of 2020, and we seamlessly transitioned to a virtual mode after that. We could go to the next slide. So these were the committee members that basically deliberated on how we can put together this report. And as Arun mentioned, this is a very huge topic, and so it has lots of different moving parts to it, and therefore the members who are involved in it really have varying expertise in technologies and policies and regulation and innovation in people processes and so on. So all of us had to really make sure that that intersectional points of view appropriately address the different points that we needed to really express in the report. If you could go to the next slide. This is a fast-moving topic, and in fact, more than any other reports, perhaps this is the one that's been really timely, because almost around the same time that we released this report is when, if you could hit return, was the extreme weather-based incident that occurred in Texas. And partly soon after that, we had the Biden administration's fact sheet, if you could hit return, which really talked about expansion and modernization of the electric grid, and their targets, if you could hit return, talks about fairly aggressive target of 100% clean electricity by 2035, and considering where we are right now, that really requires a fast-paced set of actions that need to be taken. And one other incident that again occurred between these two short months, hit-enter please, is the colonial pipeline incident that occurred, because as we walked towards the smart grid that really is responsive to various events, the cyber footprint increases, which means that we have to address some of these other challenges too. Next slide. So all of these components, oh, and in fact, what I would like to do is to really focus on the specific aspects of what the report considers. In fact, we're going to defer the topic of discussions related to weather incidents, et cetera, to this resilience report in 2017. And if you hit enter, you'll see that there are many aspects of what really leads to an extreme event and subsequent responses that are addressed in this report. And in fact, several members of this committee would also part, authors of this report, which talks more about the resilience aspects. So going to our report itself, next slide. As I said, there were many moving parts to this, and so these were the different chapters that helped us bring the whole story narrative in a cohesive manner. And we are here to just basically go over the highlights of what is considered in this report with specific focus on the legal and regulatory changes, as well as technologies and tools. Next slide. And again, given that multiple stakeholders are interested in the report, there are a huge number of recommendations that are directed to different agencies, DOE, Congress, state entities, FERC, and so on. And again, for details, please do take a look at the report, but we will definitely be highlighting some of the key ones that are pertinent to some of the topics in here. Next slide. So there are certain things that I should be mentioned, which is that we do not really predict exactly how the grid will evolve, because many of these predictions are really hard to do, and many of the times, even if you do it, it might be wrong or really totally inaccurate. So but we do lay out ways in which it might evolve. And in all of these things, that the central pillar is always that it remains safe and secure. But in addition, we need to really accommodate, given major drivers, how it can stay affordable, equitable, sustainable, provide clean power, and continue to remain reliable and of course resilient in the face of these huge emerging threats of high intensity. Next slide. So starting of the whole thing really opens up with these drivers in the report. And so the first four you can recognize as many of the points that Arun mentioned as well, that the current administration is focusing on, that the whole world is involved in a dialogue in terms of deep decarbonization, electrification of demand, the changing grid edge, and of course the rise of wind and solar. But we should also point out that the report really explicitly addresses some of these things that should be addressed as part of the whole discussion. Which is a reduction of social inequities and what the overall impact is on workforce and how we can address training, retaining, retention, etc. And the globalization of the whole landscape, including supply chains. So this sets the stage and then we then transition to how can we embrace these drivers? How can we address the challenges and really address the future of the electric power? And for that we hand it over to Sue. Thank you, Anu. I'm going to talk about Chapter 3, which characterizes policy, regulation, law, and those kinds of aspects of the architecture of the system. One of the things we talk about is the fact that we don't really have quote a US electric system. We have a set of institutional, political, natural resource, and other aspects of the electric system around the country that really makes it highly regional and highly varied. So for example, these are the RTO footprints that I'm sure you're very familiar with. Next please. And then these are transmission planning regions. There's some overlap and some not. So there's different influences going on in those places. Next. These are the footprints of the many, many electric co-ops that we have. And so we have really quite a patchwork quilt of investor owned and municipally owned and electric co-op organizations with boundaries that span small areas and large areas and cut across these different regions. Next please. These are the states that have now adopted greenhouse gas emissions targets. They make up a very large percentage of the US population and they are driving changes in the regions in which they are located not only because of state policies, but the utility commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in those footprints as well. Next. Here's a picture of those states that overlap in some sense with the ones I just mentioned. These are ones with renewable and clean energy targets. A lot of activity in a lot of different places. Next please. These are the places where states have been undertaking both legislative and regulatory initiatives to try to get ready for opening up things at the grid edge and removing barriers and so forth. A lot of activity there that we discuss in the report. Next two. Why don't you hit two slides? These are the final slides I want to show. On the right you see those are the states that have still today restructured their electric industries in one way or another. Dark blue shows those that there are really truly wires companies and the lighter blue states are ones where there's a hybrid system both traditional and some competition is in place. That also complicates and opens up innovation as well as challenges across those geographies. And then finally on the left this is a I think this is a grid wise alliance map where they use an assessment system to try to just recognize what states are doing with regard to grid modernization. And if you're blue on that map you're called a leader by grid wise alliance. If you're white essentially tan on that map you really haven't done a lot to open up things at the distribution level for new supplies new services and so forth. So a lot of activity a lot of change both at the bulk power the legal the political and distribution system levels here. Next please. I'm going to go through a handful of our recommendations in the legal and regulatory policy chapter. Here's our here's one of them. We observe that there is that there are very large outages from time to time on the system just as we saw in Texas recently. And we recommend that the federal government establish a task force to see whether or not there are any new legislative authorities that are needed to make sure that the industry and the federal government can move as quickly as possible and as comprehensively as possible to understand what happened. And that is what happened as a result either of a physical disruption on the system or a cyber disruption. We note that there are place places in the transportation industry where the federal highway transportation safety administration is I think I'm getting the acronym wrong where there is a fact finding organization that is able to provide information and and really compel timely provision of information from key players in the industry make recommendations and then the regulatory agency which is separate can decide what new standards and so forth are in place and we think that would be useful in the electric industry as well. Next please. Yes. Recommendation 2.1 is something that looks like we were a little bit prescient in some sense prior to the Texas outage. We note that the electric industry has come a long way since the enactment of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 in setting up reliability standards and then monitoring compliance with those and that's a relationship where Congress gave FERC the authority and then FERC established an electricity reliability organization and things have been moving forward. There is nothing of that sort on the gas side and to the extent that the electric industry depends these days so much on gas supply and visibility into the availability of gas and in the future as gas will be used not mainly for energy production but also for balancing services we think that Congress should also authorize FERC to have this capability for the gas industry as well and to designate some entity to set standards and assure reliability of the gas delivery system. Next please. We spend a lot of time in our chapter on transmission and we don't think that work on transmission has kept up with evolution of the markets for generation and so forth and after a lot of deliberation we ended up making these recommendations for transmission and these go to Congress. First we think it would be very useful to actually articulate a national transmission policy and this would not only focus on reliability and cost and affordability questions but also make it clear that increasingly the supply of electricity is being driven toward a cleaner lower carbon emission portfolio and in order to open up areas that have very rich resources, renewable resources such as offshore, wind, high quality solar supply and so forth. We think Congress should say what is in the national interest with regard to using transmission assets to provide the system that is clean, reliable, affordable, equitable and so forth. Then we think that FERC should do greater work to expand the policy bases for doing transmission planning and that would include providing access to those high quality renewables. Right now as you probably know the Secretary of Energy has the authority to establish national transmission corridors and to approve interstate transmission lines in them. We think FERC should have that. FERC is a regulatory agency and while the Department of Energy can do a lot of modeling and providing of evidence about the need for designation of such corridors we think giving FERC that authority is really more in its wheelhouse and we would recommend that that be the case these days and then finally if we are talking about giving FERC greater authority to approve transmission proposals we think people on the ground need to have better resources to participate in the system both transmission planning and siting. Next please. Let me spend one minute talking about the distribution element of our chapter number three. We spend a lot of time talking about the fact that this is an area that is undergoing tremendous pressure for evolution, transitions and change. Lots of customer driven behavior preferences, lots of technology offerings and service innovations and we think that state regulators should really accelerate what they're doing both in piloting, developing different market designs that are creative, removing barriers where they are standing in the way of cost effective and efficient adoption of clean energy technologies but we also know that there are some instances where there have been policies put in place in the past at the distribution level that really need to evolve. We point to net energy metering as one of the areas where that was really important for kick starting the distributed energy resources market but a lot more innovation is needed in order to assure that there is a fair and equitable progress and now let me just mention a couple things about chapter four please. Chapter four is our innovations chapter and we spend a lot of time analyzing factors that affect innovation and adoption of new technologies in the United States in the electric industry. These four factors are the uncertainty associated with future regulatory regimes, the highly regulated nature of the electric utility industry which affects innovation inhibitions in some instances, third environmental concerns that are really driving the need for more innovation and then finally we examine the changing nature of the innovation supply chain as well and as part of this one of the things we look at is the role of the federal government in R&D funding and we note that in the United States non-federal funding of R&D in the electric industry is six percent of the total dollars. That's not a sufficient investment when in combination you look at what the federal government is also spending. It's inadequate compared to what you see here. Now the chart on the left shows that the United States has been in real terms dropping its investment relative to what's been going on in every one of these other countries that we examine both in Europe and Asia and we think that the US is losing its competitive edge in terms of innovation to the detriment of the United States in its long-term health for economic manufacturing and a variety of other things. When you look on the right hand chart to normalize those numbers for GDP the US is at the bottom of the list and so we recommend that this outspending really be addressed in the near term in this decade in order to be ready for changes in the decades ahead. So we recommend that basic research be doubled and that demonstration research development and demonstration be tripled relative to where it is today. Next please. Finally this is just showing you that curve these are different estimates of where we are with regard to the billions of annual expenditures. The blip there in the post-2008 period is the recovery act that occurred during that period and we encourage that there be that kind of blip in spending so that the US can get to a position of really being a leader in this area again. I think we think our US electric industry needs to benefit from having many kinds of technologies and materials be homegrown and now let me pass it to Deepak please. Thanks Sue. Next slide please. All right so there's a lot of discussion on technologies that happens in Chapter 5, 6 and that kind of wrap up in 7 so I'm going to talk a little bit about the technology areas. I think we all agreed that the system is on the cusp of a major fundamental transformation but unlike in the past a lot of the factors are outside the industry's control and that's kind of much harder for the industry to manage because they're kind of reacting to it. Also I think if you look at the fundamental requirements the utility industry has operated on for decades. We've added two requirements with the sustainability and resiliency which were not there in the past and that again changes the way that we are thinking and reacting to everything. If you look at the chart on the upper right that's just a learning rate for PV solar shows an exponential behavior in terms of falling prices and expanding volume and that is not just for solar but it's true for batteries, it's true for semiconductors, it's true for communications, a lot of different technologies of that kind which makes it very very difficult to predict. The curve in the middle upper shows you the predictions made by the IEA in terms of growth of solar capacity and it shows that every year they've had to kind of change the assessment and so we see that when you have this level of technology change happening in areas that you don't control it's very difficult to predict and as Anu had mentioned earlier I think some of the predictions that have been made by past reports haven't necessarily panned out so the committee I think really focused on kind of trying to knit scenarios and kind of show evolutionary path phase that could occur that were driven by the changes that we're talking about. We focused on a number of pivotal technologies ranging from generation to storage to power electronics communications, grid management, microgrids and then finally cybersecurity as well. So let me take a couple of recommendations kind of work our way through that. I think we do recognize that PV and wind for instance has started to become the lowest cost generation resources but that's not enough because we do need zero carbon resources that have dispatchability, have the fast rap ramping capability to be able to fill in the gaps when PV and wind are not there. We also need to kind of make sure that there is not only short-term energy storage available but also multi-day and seasonal time shifting type of capability available and it's only with that and with the dynamic control that you have on the grid that the new grid is really going to be kind of manageable. The other thing that we kind of noticed is that many of the technologies that are coming up now whether it's PV or wind or storage, they all tend to be more modular and more distributed and they have intelligence at the edge and this kind of suggests that the paradigm itself may be changing where we've kind of come from a completely centralized high-level kind of top-left-top-down command and control type of system to one which may kind of now start operating differently. So if we go to the next slide please. Starting with generation and storage, I mean clearly photovoltaics and wind are right on top of it especially offshore wind shows some really good capacity factors but I mean whether it's CCS or it's direct air capture or it's a large-scale sequestration of CO2, I mean these are all things are the committee felt that all of the above was probably the right approach to take at this point in time especially in terms of developing because these technologies are moving so fast you know what will evolve eventually is not quite clear. We see a role for hybrid generation plants where you're combining storage with the generation and those things give you more dispatchability to the resources. We see geo as a good you know opportunity but also we are seeing a lot of interest and a lot of activity in carbon-free liquid fuels just whether it's ammonia or hydrogen or you know a hydrocarbon that is made using solar energy and carbon dioxide from the air. SMR and microreactors you know tend to be also very important in terms of opportunity but we'll wait and see how that you know is spanning out in terms of commercial availability. Energy storage very very important again we see that the short term is moving forward very very quickly we're seeing you know 100 150 megawatt type of systems being deployed in months time frame we're you know also seeing that hydrogen hydrogen has started to become meaningful in terms of extracting hydrogen from renewable resources. Pumped hydro and conversion of hydro stations to pumped hydro looks very interesting and is also being pursued. So you know we see opportunities here for balancing stabilization of the grid. We see opportunities and midterm storage in terms of optimization and grid operations and you know long-term energy storage really to kind of you know make sure that you don't have long periods of time when you don't have the available resources. Prices are dropping I mean battery prices you know we're 137 dollars a kilowatt hour and in the last year expectation to go down to 100 and less in the next year or two and that again opens everything you know up quite dramatically as well. Next slide please. So here again if you start you know looking at one of the key technologies that are needed the committee felt that power electronics you know is is one of the enabling technologies for any number of different architectures that we looked at in almost all of them to improve asset utilization to improve controllability of the resources. It was it was felt that you know power electronics at all scales you know going from you know almost micro inverters to high voltage DC you know were required to be able to connect manage and move the kinds of power that you know that you know we're we're talking about. We do express a concern. We see that there is a move towards a high inverter based resource penetration systems that is starting to happen already in in in Europe and we see that as the number of grid connected inverters increases perhaps to the millions you know that there are some new techniques that are going to be needed to ensure coordination between the inverters to make sure they do not do not interact with each other or with you know other grid you know assets that that may or may not be there and that these systems are able to kind of operate in the face of resiliency whether it's a loss of communications or it's a cyber you know compromised communications you know how do you make sure that the system actually is able to operate big challenges in terms of interoperability in terms of standards that were lagging by six to eight years in technology cycles that were moving in two-year cycles. We didn't have with so many vendors we didn't have good plug-and-play kind of you know opportunities and controls you know proprietary controls were kind of starting to become a little bit of a problem as well so this is not a problem that has been solved we are rolling things out very quickly you know but there's a lot of research that is required to be able to get to the bottom of how to make this happen and to find pathways by which this can be you know kind of implemented commercially as well next slide please. I think you know very important kind of discussion that I think was teed up by Anu and then a little bit by Sue as well is this whole idea of resiliency you know that is starting to come there. We've always talked about reliability from the bulk power system level but if you have five nines reliability in the bulk system you know at the edge of the grid where all the customers are you don't necessarily you know have that. So you know 5.4 really kind of begins to explore this idea of maybe a new paradigm where reliability and resiliency are achieved at the distribution system level with the edge resources with the distributor generation resources that are being deployed and the bulk power system delivers low cost energy 98 percent 99 percent of the time whenever it's there but it certainly allows you know the you know the resiliency to be achieved. There's a lot of issues here technical, economic and regulatory that are not fully understood you know or proven and you know required to be you know to be done as well. You know there was a discussion in terms of how do you enhance reliability and resiliency. Today we do black start and everything from the top down. Maybe there's a way to do this where you have clusters of microgrids that function autonomously under both normal and normal conditions. So if you look at the amount of distributor generation that is being deployed there's enough to be able to provide that but the technologies and the standards and the commercial you know mechanisms to make this happen or not. Next slide please. And finally I think if you look at some of the changes that are happening you know very rapidly in terms of electrification of almost everything there's you know the one that's front and foremost is really electrification or transportation. We see very very rapid growth in you know fast charging in terms of you know electric cars in terms of you know vans and buses and finally semis as well. And this poses a very big challenge and opportunity in terms of how do you how do you manage to peak to fast charge such a fleet of massive fleet of devices in the next 10 to 15 years. You might need as much as the generation capacity of the U.S. if you were to do it you know in a blind blind manner. So what is the level of coordination that is really required for that. How do you manage a system like this the distribution system has traditionally been dark. We haven't had much control on it and yet all the activities taking place on the distribution system and the complexity of coordinating this very large number of generation assets and flexible loads becomes you know very big big problem. You see you know distributed generation that is enough being installed now at the edge to meet critical loads and high value loads but and that represents a pretty big untapped resource to be able to help balance the system in real time as well as to provide resiliency. One last comment I want to kind of make out here which will feed into the cyber discussion that's coming up is when you have millions of you know inverters that are trying to maintain the grid. There is a dual requirement here where from an operational point of view the grid has to be maintained in millisecond time frame and yet you can have communication delays and cyber issues that you know kind of disrupt communications. How do you kind of make the system continue to operate in a resilient manner is an open question that needs to be addressed as well. So with that back to I think Anu it's you right. So as you saw from Deepak's presentation the technological advances are significant. The technological advances have been occurring in generation and in loads in EV in supporting storage and so given that these hardware technologies are really increasing of the appropriate management systems, appropriate software, the appropriate information and decision making also have to stay commensurate and that basically is what we address in the second half of the chapter. So while Deepak mentioned and we articulate that in the report prediction is hard. There are many different ways in which a grid can evolve but one thing that may stay immediate to all of those evolutionary scenarios is that the grid edge will get transformed. The grid edge which has stayed primarily dark as Deepak mentioned passive, fixed will change in terms of having more information available, more generation available and more flexible loads available and all of these things basically say that the grid edge in all of these evolutions will be transformed and so given that how do you make sure that you have an entire infrastructure that manages the distribution systems and that basically is some of the challenges that we outlined in this report and some of the opportunities and as as who mentioned electricity markets, the decision making structure, there needs to be appropriate changes in the policy and the regulation side and commensurately there needs to be appropriate technologies that reflect the fine grain variations in the kind of inputs that these distributed energy resources make and so that they can be appropriately incentivized and encouraged to participate in the market so that we do indeed have reliable, resilient and an affordable grid. So those are some of the points that have been addressed in this chapter next slide. Again the findings basically reflect that that these as consumers adopt more DERs how do you make sure that the information substrate and the controls and decision-making substrate is appropriately addressed and the point that Deepak mentioned about coordination is going to be a non-trivial task which means that there needs to be appropriate system-wide measures in place and let's keep in mind that all of these things basically are been systematically validated and tested to say that this is indeed a whole process by which we can develop a roadmap for this 100 percent renewable operation and the slides on the right for instance show that indeed these are possible and this kind of coordination across the nation where essentially the technological challenges that you have to have balanced generation and load is indeed possible but in order to do that continued support and in developing these efforts in RD&D for coordination using different kinds of ICT leading up to some sort of an ultra-automation so that when events like the Texas event or the colonial event happen that we are able to bounce back quickly and safely and reliably. Next slide. A specific mention should be made and that was the purpose of chapter six as to what the challenges are when we open up the increase of the cyber footprint not just with communication sensing and ICT but also with cyber security and we have to remember that bits and atoms follow different physics and therefore operational technology is different from the information technology and so there's specific mention of what those challenges or distinctions are because these attacks can occur at multiple places and this is what happened in the colonial pipeline incident as well as well as in the earlier Ukraine attacks about six seven years ago and so you know you have to make sure that the vulnerabilities are protected which means that it's not just a component white security but the system white security that has to be addressed and so different components are involved it's people's processes and technology and the chapter basically articulates what some of the challenges are in that context. Next slide. Now given that you have these different components we have to make sure that we have ways in which we can test these things and so the pivotal tools here are modeling and simulation and so the recommendations that we have in this chapter pertain to what kind of simulation tools have to be addressed so that things don't fall between the cracks. Next slide. And so in this context there are a number of recommendations which actually are conveyed to different agencies and these recommendations basically pertain to what the missing pieces are that we need to address and make sure that this grid edge challenges are really addressed across the board. So what all of this means is that we need to really look at how architecture have to evolve and I'd like to hand it over to Anjan to address those issues. Anjan. So this set the last four slides are on architecture and as somebody mentioned right in the beginning that we were asked to look at architecture specifically. Now what does architecture mean and I think most of us use the word but it's not always clear what we mean by architecture but one of the things that we know is that the architecture of the power grid is changing very fast and that's a concern and so next slide please. So let me tell you what how the committee looked at the architecture of the power grid. Now we know that architecture is changing very fast because we know that a lot of new things are going on on the distribution system adding up distributed generation active loads batteries and so on. And so so one of the layers of architecture is the physical layer itself which is the green one at the bottom of the slide which says generation transmission distribution and that's what we normally think about when we think of the power grid but increasingly we are getting a whole layer of ICT sensing communication actuation controls computers overlaying this physical layer and that is becoming more and more impactful on the grid. For example right now as somebody pointed out that there is not that much automation on the distribution side it was mainly been passive for several decades but now with all the activity going on on the edge of the grid what is happening is the distribution side and including all the way into the house or residential or commercial systems the system is getting more and more digitized and so we have to worry about that part as well and then the and on top of that as Sue pointed out there's this whole thing about the rules are changing the policies are changing and so on so now we have to worry about how do we plan how do we design what are the of the power grid and as you can as it was said in the very early the committee decided that we can't really forecast what the grid is going to look like because the grid is going to be very very diverse as it always is today remember that 20 years after deregulation of generation we still have large areas of the country which is still vertically integrated and similarly we're going to have the same thing with architecture in the future is that different parts of the country will be different and depending on all of the issues that that that's who raised under under her section and so next slide please so next slide and so if you can think of all the different kinds of architecture that may come about you can start drawing these diagrams where the different drivers these are two-dimensional drivers so you could only see two drivers in this case the the x-axis is more and more of transportation and other manufacturing turns into electricity so the more electrification on the on the x-axis and on the y-axis is the is the more decentralization of generation control agencies and so on and so you can see that the today's system is somewhere in the bottom left hand corner and and depending on which which one comes first you you can have different kinds of architectures growing next slide please so the main thing we i wanted to point out here is this issue of how do we study architectures the and we need to study architectures or architectures make a difference in whether you're doing planning operations planning operations if you're doing training of on simulators these things all are are impacted by the architecture of the system and the and given that the that we have only one grid which operates 24-7 we the only way to study these things is by simulation and so we spent some time here talking about that next slide please and so i i'll go on a few recommendations here but actually because the you can think of many other architecture recommendations spread throughout the chapters in fact there is no chapter in the in the report on architecture but i've taken pieces out from different parts of the of the report to show here and here's the the specific recommendations on how do you study architectures how to be able to do planning or operations or anything else so the first one basically says that we are the tools that we have in our disposal to do the simulation of these ever-increasing grids is is not adequate in many ways though you know i think we've already talked about the fact that with all the new technologies coming out we will have to have that's a second recommendation here you have to be able to model and and and simulate and and also that the new technologies have to be somewhat transparent to the modeler to the simulator because that's what the planners need to know whether your controls and and all other things in the all the power electronics are going to operate in a particular way that's not going to disadvantage the grid in any way the first recommendation refers to the fact that right now much of the simulation tools are vulcanized in the sense that transmission is studied differently separately from distribution and and the effect of communications on the control strategies are studied separately from the rest of it and and and this cannot be done anymore in a in a much more complicated grid where you've got thousands of EVs or thousands of of PVs on the on the grid itself so so we need to be able to do that and that's really fall into DOEs played very very well in terms of developing doing the fundamental research needed to develop these tools and the development of the tools always depend on the vendors because it that's what what it's the vendors who supply these analytical tools so the so as these tools become available and people start doing these studies this is the third recommendation these these studies have to then move up to the third level the top level of the architecture where the policymakers and and and the regulators can actually see the results of these things and even do some of those studies themselves so to be able so those kind of tools are very much necessary to be able to do make sure that the that the regulations that people are making are are are feasible from from these studies and finally the last point here is that even after doing lots and lots of simulations you're still going to go wrong because when the the real system is going to be very somewhat different than others and so ultimately there will have to be rather large experiments being taken place field testing of not just a single battery or a single pv but a set of ways to control the grid how if we're going to do a lot more decentralized control we have to run some field testing of decentralized control which means like a whole region controls have to be tested to do that so i think that's my last next slide please okay i think that's that was my last slide thank you well thank you to thanks to all of you for making this presentation for those of you joining late this is a discussion on the national academies report on the future of the electric grid in the united states i should mention that this is about the united states and for those of you also joining late this is a event organized by the bits and watts initiative of the precourt institute at stanford i have so many questions i can you know but let me just step back and sort of take a moment to assess where we are the grid is 120 years old this or what you presented is the the change that we are going to see there's so many factors that are pointing to the change that i'm not sure the grid has ever faced this kind of of drivers of change it's probably the first time in history now it's almost like you know flying in a Boeing 737 and you're redesigning and building a supersonic plane while flying without crashing it now it's a butchered the analogy but it is a it's a difficult thing and it is a tremendous opportunity that you have also laid out but it's also a perfect storm in many ways and so if you step back for a moment and and say how are we going to implement even if you plan how are we going to actually see this change happen in the united states and i want to bring this natural tension that we have in the united states of central versus decentralized and you have you know we call for a national transmission policy absolutely i completely agree with you and Anjan you have been talking about this for a long time and and that's that's on one hand that's that's important to do that on the other hand we have statewide things we have the issues about now markets that are you know for 841 order 2222 which are allows digital technologies to aggregate things and take distributed energy things at the at the distributed end to play in the wholesale market so that's again a tension between central this is decentral decentralized you have carbon policies or clean energy standards which president biden is proposing clean energy standard gives states the opportunity to design their own on fate on on roadmap whereas on the other hand you have a federal carbon tax revenue neutral carbon tax that george bush and jim baker and all have been pushing so again of central versus decent so if you take the theme of central versus decentralized thing how do you think we can address this on all of these fronts if you have thoughts about it if this came up during your deliberations we would love to hear that let me jump in so the straight answer is yes this came up all the time and we're not supposed to really share deliberations as you know well from your own committee work but i i think now just stepping back without trying to parrot the words that are in our report clearly this is a tension and again i'm speaking on behalf of myself right now and encourage my colleagues to do so as well i don't think that our institutions are coping as fast as they need to be with the technology changes that are underway the cost changes that are underway the imperatives of things like climate agenda and the discussions about infrastructure for example at the moment don't get the urgency of the need to address those questions really fast not just for economic recovery but to get ready for the future the the discussions in myriad state regulatory commissions don't they they don't have the pace of needing to address these issues fast enough and so i'm answering it first by saying aroun yes this is really a real life tension i the committee didn't choose a a profile for the future that says it's all decentralized all centralized and so forth recognizing all of that can be part of the picture but we also said things are not changing as fast in the man made systems the the again legal legal institutional organizational layer i'll stop there maybe i can add something here aroun to the buck as as soon said this came up a lot in in the discussions i think there's a fundamentally different point in time that we are at that i think is worth kind of thinking about for the first time i mean all this time we've said central central central because it gives lower cost better reliability all the things that you want things are under control for the first time using market driven forces we're starting to see the cost of energy and distributed generation starting to drop under five cents a kilowatt hour and you know it's starting to become you know have all the attributes that people are wanting and it's market driven so you know that tension is going to only increase now because for the first time i think in the next three four five years you'll start seeing you know commercially viable solutions that could run from the edge if the the center doesn't move fast enough they'll just disconnect and keep running or something like that i mean this is my own personal opinion but i know i see a very unique point in time where the entrepreneurs and the technologies and the the commercialization is at a pace that is just not being matched by the central decision makers so i hope you you know you treat that so let me go ahead okay thanks and uh so if i could add to uh what v park ensou mentioned the tension is real the tension was discussed uh the the tension was deliberated a lot in order to figure out what the right way is to parse it in the report but we also wanted i'd like to mention one thing that the technology chapter which is chapter five made an explicit point to address which is that you can start to parse this tension in different ways and um delineate what the technological building blocks are that are available that is feasible that can realize different pathways by which you can move from a centralized to a distributed paradigm not en masse not everywhere not a total revolution but in studied ways and in specific components so that you can uh address as to ways in which you can um embrace distributed generation you can embrace um a high penetration of electrification of demand and at the same time provide affordable and reliable power in a resilient manner so that pathway and the support of different technologies both from the hardware and from information and control point of view how they need to be put together and how you can have the market design structures and the technological basis for that in order to implement this change was articulated but no question that technology does not proceed in a vacuum and so just why the points that Sue mentioned are very appropriate that we need to have the appropriate support structure to diffuse this tension and figure out ways in which we can address these compelling drivers that we have in terms of deep decarbonization and climate crisis um and move towards a clean electricity so I'll hazard a personal opinion here um and so in continuation of what Anu was trying to say um you know I my personal opinion is that this question of central versus decentralized is is not a real valid question because both will have to exist a long long time and because things are both have advantages and disadvantages but both but some of it will be necessary in all cases I'll take a couple of examples here if you think about the market everybody thinks of this as a decentralized thing because everybody is bidding and everybody every generator is all free to do whatever they want but actually the the market solution is a very centralized solution and it's getting more central all the time when you realize that the optimal solution that we come up with the bigger the optimization space you're going to get more optimal. Similarly if we think of just control itself the two most common controls is is frequency control and voltage control voltage control people can say okay so let's make that very decentralized but nobody thinks of doing frequency control centralized in fact in this country we have decreased our number of balancing authorities dramatically over time and so that's all central and the the real question is which one is the better option which balance which balance of central versus decentralized and each of these operations will have to be looked at differently or separately and maybe the answers will come out differently at different regions of the country. Fabulous and if you're in the audience and you want to ask questions please do so to the Q&A and I'm going to transition to that before that I'd like to just add one more and by the way Anjan that highlights and underscores your point about architecture architecture and all its forms not just in the physical but even the cyber etc you spent quite a bit of time on innovation and you highlighted how much we are spending or not spending. In your data what was striking was the absence of China and I was wondering if you could see a little bit about that vis-a-vis if you are going to have innovation in the United States there is at least a thought that perhaps the regulated monopoly structure is not conducive for that and maybe it is but maybe it is not could you comment a little bit on both those international front and China because they seem to have some of the best high voltage technology and they're going international and also how do we do that in the United States? Well maybe I'll start and then invite colleagues to pile on and I should thank the lead committee members David Victor from San Diego and Karen Palmer from Resources for the Future who spent a lot of time on this innovation chapter but back to your question the industrial policy character between the United States and China just could not be more different and that plays out I mean that's the first answer that I have to your question Arun the drive in China to become the best and then to bring all charging forces to make that happen not just on R&D not just on copying other people's technologies not just then taking that to the next level but also deploying it and piloting it and getting it into the field I mean that is all hands on deck in China and we aren't there in the United States and we aren't there for myriad reasons ranging from we have different understandings of industrial policy in Washington DC both between the the houses in Congress the the parties in Congress them vis-a-vis the executive branch agencies but also the willingness to see the public good nature of getting ahead in innovation one of the things that we point to is that for decades utilities have had and I'm speaking specifically utilities have had a difficult time getting approval for investments in R&D from their regulators because you know the of the difficulty of capturing and internalizing the benefit of that for one's ratepayers so that's why the feds really need to play a role but we but we also need to see that we're we've been banking too long in the U.S. on yesterday's innovations and we really need to move that forward so that's just a touch I don't want to occupy the conversation but that's a touch of a response so let me add this differentiation broader way of doing things but I just want to end with suggesting one thing that is not clear at the moment is this thing that about the public good research is being can only be done by the government because nobody who's building TVs panels or wind generators are going to worry about the public good as long as the public as long as the good includes in their equipment so is the systems aspect of it the kinds of things we talked about and the architecture aspect of it that's where really the only endowment R&D is needed in a big big way. Maybe I can add a second to that Arun? In my mind I think the most fundamental difference is really that you know we've developed our system over the last 50 years or 60 years since Bucca to really assume that the technologies is going to evolve very slowly and under directed control and the whole mechanism has been set up to minimize the risk so every decision that is made to the utility environment is made to really you know reduce the risk and to manage progression very slowly whereas you know things are moving extremely fast right now and you know whether it's a centralized structure or whatever but you know the China is much more open to taking risk and putting things out and learning from it you know we haven't been prepared to do that and we're just sitting on our you know royal whatever. Let's move on to the audience questions and I'm going to hand this over to Leong. Thank you Arun and thank you all four panelists and speakers excellent presentation and we received a lot of questions I see all of you are very busy of responding to these questions in the next 10 minutes what I'm going to do is combine or some of the questions together and echo what the report has been discussed has been mentioned and ask you some recommendation or questions. So the first question is about the chapter two regarding the drivers of the changes okay understand that the committee didn't perform any detailed modeling or use very detailed results from specific model instead the whole committee has chosen to make only some specific forecasts about what the future of the grid might look like that's what Andrew mentioned the first beginning instead of what will be right so the question is the first can you elaborate a little bit more what's the philosophy of doing that and the second the question is there's a lot of study and the report available right now talking about decarbonizing how the decarbonizing agreement looked like what the study does what tells them to do that what's your recommendation of the data input into these models regarding the demand side and the supply side and what kind of forecasting method they should consider should be careful. Well I just maybe I'll start again on this one the committee decided after reviewing the success track record of long-term forecasting that they're they're always wrong and they're always wrong because of assumptions such as the reliance on demand side measures such as the you know the drivers for greater efficiencies that end up coming and so it was a thoughtful reason why we did not rely on our own modeling because we thought we would be adding to that problem of predicting the future and getting it wrong and therefore wanted to focus on what are some things that really affect the future no matter what happens and or what could be drivers so we thought it was more useful to talk about those then to put out one more forecast and then certainly that I think the committee did not at all comment on the quality of the data assumptions in any of the forecasts simply because we thought we had enough to do on looking at the other the other elements. Maybe I can add something here Sue I mean I think we looked at you know a number of scenarios that we thought could evolve and you know which particular one would evolve would depend on which technology matured faster which got adopted faster which got uh buying from regulators faster which you know there's a whole bunch of different things none of which were under anybody's control so it seemed to us that it was more important that whatever technologies were invested in made the grid more adaptive more flexible more responsive to changes that you couldn't anticipate fully and plan for and you know I think DOE also kind of suggested to us that they wanted to see us come up with what they called no regret investment type of strategies okay and I think this is really important I mean we've kind of assumed in the grid space that things are going to remain the same forever and ever I mean you have two trillion dollars of assets how can you go wrong and I think you can I mean this is the problem and so I think this was guiding the committee I think. I can go next first let me offer a personal opinion and then what was discussed in the report by the committee. The personal comment is I'm a systems person by profession and so the question here is how do we go from say 30% renewables to 100% renewables the grid is a large-scale system so no amount of modeling is going to be able to tell you what happens if you go from 30% renewables to 100% renewables it'll involve a lot of forecasts and as was mentioned in in the park slide and some of the others earlier any kind of prediction will be inaccurate false so that's the main reason why we did not say this is the way in which the grid will evolve but that doesn't mean that we don't have modeling efforts that were under you know that were shared in the recommendations and findings so the committee why we discussed quite a bit as to what kinds of modeling efforts need to be in place we had my modeling workshop that discussed all of the different tools that have to be in place because the grid edge being changing the modeling efforts and the simulation efforts have to properly change so those kinds of tools those kinds of recommendations are very much in order and they encompass both supply generation as well as loads and that was very much that's you can see that you will see that in the findings and recommendations. Yeah I know it makes a really important point I interpreted that question to be are you modeling what the portfolio of generation and demand side and transmission technologies are going to be going forward that's the thing we didn't do we called for much better investment in modeling tools for system designers that's really needed and so we did spend on Jen I'm also looking at you we spent a lot of time talking about that and have recommendations for those kinds of investments. Okay let's do a quick because we have very limited time let's do a quick rapid fire to the chapter five on technology there's some question regarding specific technology I'd like to get opinion and from you regarding three specific technologies one is vehicle to grid and the second is long duration storage the third one is what's the future of nuclear can each of you just comment one of them and quickly. I could start with you certainly I mean you know vehicle to grid is going to be you know one of the technologies that will play it's not clear to me how important it's going to be I don't think it's going to be a battery issue if you have you know a million vehicles connected and you have a big transient of the grid they should definitely support the grid and you know vehicle to home should definitely be a part of it the question is you know we don't have all the systems in place to make that inexpensively happen so that's that's one V2G and certainly on LDES I think you know it's a critical requirement but I suspect it's probably going to be hydrogen and ammonia or something like that carrier that's going to be able to be generated when possible and and support but that's my personal opinion we say everything is possible. If we don't solve the long duration storage question and we push for a an increasing percentage of renewables we are going to have a very very expensive system that's going to be challenged in a world of high extreme climate change. Yes so all of these technologies that we are looking at today they they're all good and they can be used in many different ways the part which is missing I think is that is are they going to be reliable enough are they going to give us the resiliency and by that I mean even if something is very good to do for 90 99% of the time it's that 1% of the time that will get you into trouble and what is the backup for that I mean you talk about the Texas situation you talk about the California situation you know it is just for a few hours but we don't know which hours they're going to be and we don't know what the problem is going to be so that's the difficult part. And in fact in some sense it comes back to Aaron's question about you know is it centralized or is it distributed I think as you address that question all of the host of technology or subsequent questions are driven by that because the technology makes for one kind of a situation which might be very much the residents that the desired solution in one part of the country is not going to be the same elsewhere and therefore the generation mix appropriately will have to defer as well in order to provide a resilient and reliable grid. Okay last question and this I'm very glad someone in the audience asked this question and I'd like to repeat it again and what are the challenges recommendation for the workforce training education I know that all of you are educated what's your recommendation to Stanford faculty and students are involved in the future great research and education. My response is already in the chat you guys take a look in the answered question from me and what I said there was we really think that there's a workforce issue both from operating power plants with different technologies all the way down to cyber that's a huge shortage of talent we call for greater work on understanding this issue funded by NSF as well as support federally for more workforce training and that's just the tip of the iceberg but also for you know for the the workers in the electrified industries whether it's it's electric vehicles or it's electrification of the chemical industry or whatever I mean there's going to be a whole retraining needed for that as well. So the one of the workforce training comes up you know the professors and the group always jumps up and says where we did more master degree or something like that actually the need is much more is the who's going to put in the PV systems who are going to do the do the PV systems who are going to put in the micro electronics needed to control all of these things that part of the workforce issue is really really difficult and you know our our educational system for the training of technicians and so on it doesn't change very rapidly and is not very good to begin with. So tell the students this is the coolest area to go into this is a full employment area for the future. Right it's not your grandfather's grid anymore it's going to be entirely different and it requires it has a myriad challenges which an AI is really no match for us at this point. Terrific terrific thank you again I wish we had more time I thank you again for the excellent presentation and uh uh suggestion to our students I would hand this back to Arun. Well thank you Leong and you know this conversation can as you can see can go on for a long time but all good things must come to an end. Let me just say that on behalf of the country thank you for putting time and effort and your ideas in in this report at this moment in time because as we all know the electric grid is going through some fundamental changes which if you don't do it right will affect our economy will affect the environment and climate and will affect our security and so this is so this is a historic report and thank you for devoting time and effort and ideas in presenting the case and I really really hope that this is taken up not just by the Department of Energy and FERC but distributed to all the nooks and crannies of the nation because and which is I know why you're doing the roadshow but this needs to be adopted and taught through so that it is the the decentralized part also gets it and and also the educators and Anjan correctly pointed out the the labor that is needed and the vocational training that is needed in addition to the graduate degrees and all of that that created the workforce to really create the 21st century grid to make the 21st century the most important engineering innovation of the 20th 21st century so thank you again for taking the time and and thanks for your thoughts and ideas appreciate it thank you very much for thank you