 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our briefing this afternoon on Renewable Energy, Technology, Trends and Economics. EESI, the Environmental Energy Study Institute, and ACORT are very happy to welcome you this afternoon. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the Executive Director of EESI. And I would also like to thank Senator Kuhn's office for all of their help with regard to this briefing, and also Congressman Van Hollen's office. And I would right now also like Bill Parsons with Congressman Van Hollen to make a few brief comments, because the Congressional Caucus on Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency is a very, very important piece of what happens up here on Capitol Hill. And Congressman Van Hollen is one of the co-chairs of that very important caucus. Bill? So thanks Carol. I will be brief. I'm Bill Parsons. I'm Chief of Staff to Congressman Van Hollen. And along with Congressman Van Hollen, I want to extend a welcome to you all. And Congressman Dave Reichert is our Republican co-chair of the Caucus for the 113th Congress. I want to, for those of you who are not yet familiar with the Caucus, and I'm going to guess that many of you are since you're here. It's one of the longest running bipartisan caucuses in the Congress. We try to be an all-purpose forum for all things renewable energy and energy efficiency on a, I'd say bipartisan, even nonpartisan basis. Happy to partner with terrific organizations like EESI and ACOR on events like this. Have two lists served. We go weekly for calendars of events as well as a weekly clip service. So particularly for those folks here from congressional offices, and doubly, particularly for new member offices, please get in touch with either myself or Ashley Johnson, my opposite in Rep Reichert's office, if this is something you'd like to get involved with so you can hear about terrific events like this one today. So that's my plug and I hope to hear from you. Enjoy the rest of the session. Because the objective is that we would love to see the majority of the House be members of the caucus, and we're hopeful that that will also happen on the Senate side, which also has a bipartisan caucus on renewables and efficiency as well, which is, and that particular caucus is co-chaired by Senator Mark Udall and by Senator Crepo. So let's get on with our important program this afternoon. We are so glad that you are all here and to see this kind of interest in renewable energy. Obviously, as we think about where energy, where environment, where economy needs to go for this country and our globe, it is terribly important to really think about the family of resources that we already are tapping with regard to renewable energy resources, where they come from, what they do, and the promise of those technologies both that we are already seeing realized in that that is only going to grow. And we have a terrific lineup of speakers this afternoon to kind of walk us through what really is happening with regard to renewables in our economy and also globally. And so right now, I would like to turn to Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, who is the president of ACOR, the American Council on Renewable Energy, and he has been a wonderful partner and collaborator on many, many issues as we look at clean energy and it's very, very promising future. Denny. Thank you, Carol. And welcome as well. I want to start by saying how wonderful it is to be partnered with Carol and EESI. It's a wonderful organization. We started down this path of planning this event a while back because we thought that the timing of it was really, really important. There's so much discussion. There's hope and aspirations and a little bit of fear anytime you start a new endeavor like the 113th Congress. And we thought that the best way to deal with aspirations and hopes is to back them up with some good information. And that's what we are here today to hopefully provide you some information, a way of thinking perhaps about renewable energy that will help in deliberations to come as we move towards a better energy future for the United States. You hear the expression all of the above. I am all for all of the above strategy. It was certainly a buzz phrase during the campaign season. And to me, what it means is wanting to create an energy portfolio for transportation energy as well as for electricity that is more diverse, balanced and resilient. And the way that you do that with renewable energy is to expand the portion of that portfolio in which we as a nation are going to invest to create more renewable energy. We at ACORE represent all forms of renewable, certainly wind and solar, but hydro, geothermal, tidal, biomass, biofuels across the board. And so it gives us a very unique perspective working with our trade association partners who go deeper in a particular type of renewable energy to get an appreciation for the true value proposition of renewable energy. And that value proposition is simply this. Our nation, indeed, the world faces three large challenges. Energy security, economic security and environmental security. And renewable energy in all of its forms addresses those challenges and turns them into opportunities. We have come to the point in this country, certainly, where the old argument about, well, do you want to have economic growth or do you want to have sustainability is moot. No longer and never really was that valid. But we can say that renewable energy, looking over the past five to 10 years, deployment is up, prices are down. The value proposition is delivering in both transportation energy as well as in electricity. And that's what we want to hopefully convince you of today. The name of this gathering, if you will, renewable energy technology and finance, I would point out are like two slices of bread. And we need to put something in the middle to make it a sandwich. The one slices the technology for renewable energy, all of those forms that I mentioned. And the other slices, of course, the finance or investment needed. But what has to go in between this sandwich, or we can think of it as an Oreo cookie because there are cupcakes in the room, I guess. And what has to go in that sandwich is policy. Policy at the federal level, certainly, and policy at the state and in some cases municipal level. Because the right kinds of policy make it either more or less difficult, or the right the right kinds of policy make it less difficult to marry up the tens of billions of dollars that are sitting on the sidelines in America looking for a place to be invested with the great existing and emerging forms of renewable energy that can deliver and are in fact delivering more and more each year on the promise of renewable energy to address those challenges of energy security, economic security and environmental security. And I will say simply that that environmental security is not just the compelling challenge of global warming and greenhouse gas production. It certainly is that. But think about it at the local and regional levels. Think about how many people love electricity, everybody for all of the obvious reasons. How many people are comfortable living five miles downwind from a coal fired power plant with their families? Not so many. And the good news is we no longer have to rely as much on traditional forms of electricity production and transportation energy as we did before because renewable energy is delivering new options that are clean, that are economically viable and really deliver on the value proposition. Last point, we have a wonderful resource at a core that is populated by great partner organizations like EESI called energy fact check dot org. Or if you're a tweeter, it's at energy fact check. I got to find out what that tweeting is. I've heard it's something to do with the internet or something like that. It's a great resource for really finding out the facts. It busts myths about renewable energy will never scale. It's too expensive. It's totally dependent upon government giveaways or subsidies. All wrong. But you can say they're wrong and people say, yeah, sure. You can say they're wrong and provide the real facts of the situation about the real technologies, the real investments and the real policies that are in fact delivering on renewable energy. So thank you for being here today. I'll turn it back to Carol who introduced the next speaker and I look forward to your questions. Thanks a lot. And as Admiral McGinn said, you know, we often hear so much about renewables and electricity. But it is really important to also think about the services that renewables provide in transportation, which you mentioned, but also in the whole area of industrial processes in terms of thermal heat energy, which is an incredibly important piece of our economy. Before we move to our next speaker, there are four seats right down here in front. So if any of you who are standing would like to come down, it's perfectly all right to do that. So you don't have to stand. So feel so feel free. Okay, there go three seats. We've got one left. Terrific. I would now like to turn to our first speaker. We are so glad to have Steve Chalk with us. Steve is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Renewable Energy at the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy with the US Department of Energy. So did we say energy enough times? And Steve has been with the EERE for more than 20 years and where he is responsible for managing a portfolio for energy research development and demonstration and deployment. And and he has I should also mention, because I think that Denny McGinn would appreciate this, that Steve started his career in the Navy. Thank you, Carol. And thank you to EESI and ACORE for sponsoring this. Really appreciate it. And again, I'm from the Office of Energy Efficiency Renewable Energy. For congressional staff here, I'd like to introduce Sarah Blackwood over here. Sarah, if you could just stand up a moment so people see who you are. If you want a briefing from our office, Dave Danielson is a relatively new Assistant Secretary. It's a holdover from the administration change or changes that are happening in the department as a result of the President's reelection. To contact Sarah and she can arrange those briefings, we'd be glad to give those to members of Congress and to the staff. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what we're doing at Renewable Energy at the Department. And I guess I should first start off with sort of a little bit of background here. As many people know, when you look at capacity or power and energy, we're talking about 1100 gigawatts of power capacity for the nation. You can see the breakdown into the various resources there with renewables about 13. Then you go down to making energy or kilowatt hours, about 4,000, we have about 4,000 terawatt hours of energy. You can see some changes because of capacity factor going to the top to the bottom there. And just, you know, you remember five, six years ago coal was around 50%. Now it's 42%. Some of that's been picked up by natural gas. Some of that's been picked up by renewables and nuclear has been about stable over the last five or six years. Then you can see, of course, the changes here with hydro being about 8%. Wind over 3% now. These are 2011 numbers. So these need to be updated as the data starts to come in for the calendar year 2012. And I'll show what we installed this year from various sources. It's been an excellent year for renewable energy. Plenty of resources. And if you remember that roughly 1,000 gigawatts of power capacity in the US, you can see different technologies can provide all of that and many times that in different cases. And this is from our National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Go to their website, you can pull down theoretical resources for each of the different renewable energy technologies. So what do we do? So we think renewable energy can provide a substantial role in meeting our nation's energy needs. And we have a few reports that might be interesting reading, which I have on the bottom here. The first is a renewable energy future study that was just published last year, where we asked ourselves, you know, what would it take if we were to provide 80% of our power needs with renewable energy? Could we do that? Not so much as a plan or prediction or projection, but what are the implications of that? What barriers do we run into in terms of building transmission? What kind of increased flexibility do we need? Do we need energy storage? Things like that. In addition, the Rocky Mountain Institute also did a similar study. So there's plenty of resources there. And what we tried to do as a department is address those. Number one, barrier we think is access to low cost technology. But as the Admiral mentioned, there's other barriers, market barriers, they could be transmission. For instance, when we work with other agencies to look at radar impacts, and how that wind turbines are impacting that with the DoD, the FAA, other agencies. So there's a lot of institutional different market barriers. And then of course, there's the finance barriers, we're looking different ways to bring more money into the sector. Because the number one goal of all of this is to scale all of this technology, we don't scale, we won't make an impact in terms of greenhouse gases, or energy security, or the economic impacts that we want to have. So these are really the three areas we work on. And hopefully we'll have a lot of discussion today on that when we get to the Q&A session. I'm going to focus a little bit on the primary role of department, which is research, development and demonstration, where we're really trying to come down the cost curve. And what I did, I used the Bloomberg's data here, because they track hundreds of projects. And our goal on all of our renewable programs, whether it's transportation energy, or whether it's renewable power is to compete to have cost-comparity on an unsubsidized basis with conventional resources. So we're trying to get down to this natural gas target. You see the triangles here, five to six cents a kilowatt hour. There's a broad line here in the purple on all of these, because these vary depending on the performance of the technology, the size of the technology or the scale. You could depend on the financial parameters. There's lots of variables that you get a lot of bandwidth, if you will, on these cost numbers. So the bottom here is dollars per megawatt hour. You can just divide that by a thousand to get cents per kilowatt hour. So we're more familiar with those units. So here we're talking about five, six cents a kilowatt hour. You can see flash geothermal plants can compete in that area, as well as a lot of waste to energy technology, which is really low hanging fruit for a lot of municipalities. Things like onshore winds are very, very competitive. You can see offshore up here, being in neighborhood of 25 cents a kilowatt hour, at least when we look at the projects going in. And you can see where we have to come. And some of the tidal and weight device, of course, a little less mature, relatively young program as a Department of Energy still has a way to go to come down that cost curve. Let me talk a little bit about what we're doing. So when 13 gigawatts over that installed last year, we are still getting the DOE, EIA data in for 2012. And but this is a way of data, and they track this very closely. So enough power for 15 million homes. We're definitely over the hurdle of 3% of US electricity. You can see the economic impact in terms of number of jobs, the private investment. And the other good indicator that's gone up over the last few years, back in 2008, 40% of the turbines or the domestic content was about 40% in terms of turbines installed in the US. Now, 2011, our latest data is over 70%. So this is an important impact to our US economy. So over 60 gigawatts total. And a couple years ago, back in 2008, we did a study of what would it take for the US to go to 20% wind by 2030? And that's an energy unit. But that happens to correspond to roughly 300 gigawatts. So about 50 of that we looked at offshore the rest was land based. So you can see this again, not a projection, but we did lay out what would be the ramp rate to hit that goal of 2030. And you can see over the last four years, since 2008, we're above that curve here. So we're doing pretty well. You know, will we remain on that slope? I don't know the I think is this group knows very well, maybe we get into discussion. The uncertainty in the policy area is really going to affect the slope there. So right now the good news is we're ahead. So what are we doing at Department of Energy now on the land based side? We're trying to optimize plant performance. So it's a very mature industry in terms of installing turbines turbine performance. But we know that we can actually pick up greater performance, perhaps 1520% greater performance. If we optimize the way of plant or when the array is laid out, each turbine is going to see a different velocity profile, we may see turbulence. So we're trying to study that with a capability that we have across the DOE National Lab complex, can we improve that performance, make that placement of turbines different and strata have a strategy associated with that with that to improve that performance. Also component development advanced direct drive systems and all always doing a lot of testing for reliability, finding out where the the weakest links are so to speak, to improve reliability is critical. The offshore is a big area of new emphasis for us now. And in 2011, we awarded about 42 projects, really the component development, market barrier removal, one example of that would be to look at the financing required for offshore because that can really the risk perceived there can really dominate the cost. In addition, offshore is going to have to have a different paradigm for operation and maintenance of the turbine. So we have studies looking at that as well. Again, these are sort of institutional financial barriers. And then just about a month ago, we announced over seven projects for a new offshore wind. And the way we have this structured is we're going to take those seven projects. We have great geographic diversity. We have turbines that would be going to North Atlantic off of Maine, mid Atlantic, New Jersey, even Virginia, Goff, Lake Michigan, and even the Pacific. So we have a quite a variety or geographic diversity, if you will. What we'll do is phase one, where we'll have a design bake off. Some of these because we have deep water resources in the US, we envision that the floating platform is really going to be more economical. So we're asking people to design these new platforms, whether they're floating or different monopile designs, the lower that cost of energy. And then after a couple of years, we'll then pick three projects that will actually go and install in the water with a 2017 timeframe in mind. So that's our new program. If we get the money appropriated be about $168 million up to 2017, we actually get them into the water. Now I'm going to transition to solar. What we're doing there another great year. And just again, five, six years ago, we were lucky to have 500 megawatts of solar installed per year. Last year was 1.8 gigawatts of PV. This year, or this past year in 2012, that went up to three gigawatts, total seven gigawatts. So you see, solar is really starting to take off like wind has in the last few years. Enough to power about a million homes. So creeping up there, I hope in about two or three years, we can say solar is at 1% of our energy generation, where winds over 3% now. We have again, a high economic impact, 119,000 workers in the solar field today. And I want to talk a little bit about the progress that we made at DOE. This is a counterfactual study. So it looked is what would happen without the DOE support. And that's that red line there. And we had this report was done, it was by an outside firm, it was peer reviewed. And you can see here the red line over the last 35 years tracks all the way down from nearly 80, this is a logarithmic plot, so probably $80 per watt down to about $5 per watt without DOE sponsorship of R&D. With it about $1.92. And again, this is 2008. So these numbers have changed drastically since then. But you can see almost a factor of three difference here. And when you look at one number, say $8 per watt, through all horizontal line here, what would have happened without the DOE support, you could see here, we accelerated that timeline 12 years. So this is some of the studies that we're trying to do so that we can show a rate of return for that taxpayer dollars, which a lot of members of Congress really want to see, they want to see how how we know we're impacting the markets. So it's been about a three a factor of three cost reduction, I want to show you some of the impact, the acceleration of 12 years, I mentioned, if you go to the really all the patent literature, about 30% of the patents have been associated with companies that DOEs work with. This is worldwide. So quite an impact there. About 57% of the world records and PV have been associated with DOE sponsorship. And we have an incubator program that's invested $60 million. And a lot of times what that does is if DOE puts its money into something, because we have all these projects very carefully peer reviewed, we attract a lot of private capital. So this incubator program alone, where we invested $60 million, we actually leveraged 1.6 billion of private capital. So factor roughly of 25 there. So a lot of success in the PV area, we have our sun shot target of $1 a watt, which correlates really to that five or six cents a kilowatt hour, which is our ultimate target to compete with conventional fuels. This is our roadmap, I won't go through each individual area. But we have targets for all the areas, not just the module, but the power electronics to balance the system, all of it, whether it's soft or hard costs, soft costs or things like siting and permitting and so forth. So we have technical targets, investments aimed at each of these areas to come down this cost curve, hit a dollar or one. Similarly, we have a similar roadmap, we're concentrated solar power. And this is a thermal electric power. So you're producing high quality heat, running that through a steam turbine to produce electricity. We have a breakdown of all the major components here, the solar field, the receiver, again, to hit that dollar per watt, or that five to six cents per kilowatt hour down here. So this is really what's driving our roadmap. I quickly want to go through the rest. Geothermal, a lot of work on trying to lower the upfront risk of development of conventional geothermal, where there's about 30 gigawatts of potential there, where we're trying to develop new exploration tools because you always don't get that obvious surface expression of where the geothermal is. You got to figure out what is under the ground there to mine that heat. A lot of emphasis on enhanced geothermal, which is sometimes called engineered geothermal, where we go deep enough so we can mine the heat, but we fracture the rock and hopefully don't lose the water that we inject down there and then bring up through the production well. So this is the emphasis of our program, and we're working in all of these areas here, and I can maybe get into more detail here in the Q&A session. But the other thing we're finding out about enhanced geothermal is it's also enhancing, if you will, our near term or conventional hydrothermal geothermal, because as those fields degrade, we can use some of the techniques in ETS to actually bolster that production for hydrothermal technology. Water is, again, kind of a nascent technology. These are a couple of devices that we have in the water now or soon will be. We have the tidal device in the water in Maine, and then we have this device here, actually New Zealand Origins, that Oregon Company is now, and we're working with a Navy off of Hawaii to deploy that device and test it. So a lot of promising results here from these ocean and wave devices and tidal devices. Quickly on transportation, again, our strategy is electrification, which of course all the renewable power can provide that electricity for electric vehicles. But also an important part of that strategy is biofuels. Long term, it's renewable hydrogen for fuel cells. Biofuels, we think, has a really good match and things that aren't that conducive to electrification. Things like heavy trucks, aviation, those types of applications. So we're looking at high density biofuels now. What we feel like we've done over, and I'll skip the EPA projections here in time, but we can come back to those during the Q&A. We feel like we've completed the R&D on cellulosic ethanol. So this is generation two biofuels where we've hit our target of 265 a gallon. If we project that to a commercial scale, we think we are finished the R&D. We're now pivoting to cellulosic based or algae based gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. And these later too, again, are these applications which aren't as conducive to electrification. So we think biofuels can play a big role there in terms of displacing oil. Right now we're scaling up. We have three demonstration programs, NEOS in Florida. Then we have a poet plant under construction that will go in Iowa and then Avangoa has a plant that they're building in Kansas. These two are a commercial scale like 20 million gallons a year. So we'll validate whether we've hit our R&D target as we go through and construct these plants and go through the first years of operation. And then fuel cells, a lot of progress there to lower the cost of the power plant. We've gone through a couple hundred dollars a kilowatt down to $49 a kilowatt. So you can see the great progress that the program has made over the last decade. And what that's done is really set us up for near term application. Automotive is the hardest because the cost targets are really, really tough to hit. But what we've done is we come down this cost curve. We're seeing a lot of early market penetration and these dots are all the early market penetration for materials handling equipment, backup power, different stationary power. So you can see fuel cell industries really starting to take off in these other applications. And that will provide manufacturers the learning curve they need to eventually hit the automotive targets of $30 per kilowatt. And you can see here we'll provide the slides, some of the progress made on the vehicles in terms of the refueling time. We've literally had 10 to thousands of safe refuelings with hydrogen. We still have ways to go on durability. We've got about $2,500. We need to get $5,000 to correlate to the full useful life of a vehicle. And of course we have to tackle the infrastructure. And we're looking at innovative concepts. This is called tri generation, where we make power and heat, but we also make fuel for the fuel cell vehicle. So we're looking at applications like this that have other value streams as we transition to hydrogen infrastructure. And finally, I wanted to say that really trying to bring all this together, that I talked a lot about coming down the cost curve. But we know at the end of the day, cost is necessary, but not sufficient to get high market penetration. We've got to solve grid integration barriers. Utilities want to be very comfortable. They want to have a low risk in terms of how do they handle all of this PV on their grid. We also have electric vehicles, building loads and things like that all to plug in and really sort of work out in integrated fashion. So this is the emphasis going forward, or a major emphasis going forward for our program. And again, this comes out of some of those studies, which again are projections, but they say what if we'd have 80% renewables by 2030 or 2050? What are those implications? And out of the NREL study really drove us to this emphasis on grid integration. We have to lower these perceived and real risks in order to get the high penetration we want. And of course, then the energy and the environment and economic impacts that will then benefit as we raise those penetration rates. So with that, Carol, I'll wrap up and turn it over to the next speaker. Thanks. We had given Steve kind of an impossible task to kind of cover that whole huge waterfront. But I must say, Steve, I was also so glad to see that you finished in the cloud. And as you know, there are lots of issues that he raised that can be more fully discussed, and I would really encourage folks to follow up with him and certainly offices to ask DOE to come in and really talk about all the exciting things that really are happening on the technology development and deployment front. And also, the PowerPoints will be available on EESI's website by the end of the afternoon. So I know that you couldn't see that, but you can get a hold of those PowerPoints by the end of the afternoon. So I now would like to turn to our next speaker to Shirley Neff, who is a senior advisor with the EIA, the Energy Information Administration, because we all end up turning to EIA when we want to just find out what really is happening in terms of what are the facts with regard to looking at the U.S. energy profile, what's also happening internationally, and that data that is collected forward, the updates that are provided by EIA are invaluable, and we are delighted that Shirley is here to talk to us today about what we're seeing in terms of looking at the U.S. profile and what we're seeing in those trends. Shirley? Thank you very much, Carol. There was a hearing in the House Energy and Commerce Committee this morning, and the administrator Adam Suminski spoke, and while renewables were part of it, most of the attention was on oil and gas in particular because the growth rates from the shales have been so high, but I would just call your attention to the early release of the annual energy outlook 2013, and one of the headlines in, you know, that executive summary is, renewable fuel use grows at a much faster rate than fossil fuel use. So I think the current story, although it starts from a lower base, is very bullish for renewables. I'm going to quickly go through these slides, and there are plenty of things that we can discuss in much more detail in the Q&A. First of all, I wanted to introduce Kris Namovich, who is our number one renewables modeler, and April Lee, who's another one of our renewables experts, who just came back to EIA from a rotation at NREL. This slide shows renewables as a percent of total energy. So renewables across the board, wood, mostly in the pulp and paper industry, some co-firing and some, you know, thermal heat for residential purposes, biofuels, mostly the liquid sector, the transportation sector. For the electric sector, for power generation, renewables are now 13 percent. And in the AEO, we're projecting them to grow to 16 percent by 2040. And I will just say right now that when we did the AEO 2013, the PTC extension had not passed. So that does not factor in the most current or the most recent change to the law. EIA does that because for policymakers, and this goes back to the history of EIA when it was created as an independent statistical agency and charged with doing an annual outlook. The determination was the only way you could fairly determine or assess the impact of a policy is if you had a policy neutral forecast that just was based on current law and policy and that didn't assume any extension or anything else or any new policy in the law. Interestingly, after many years of, you know, the rest of the renewables being a tiny portion of the total in October of last year, non-hydro renewables passed hydro renewables. There was a drought, obviously, and hydro generation was down some, but renewables, the rest of the renewable suite, exceeded hydro. This is EIA's projection for electricity demand growth. Now, when I got into the business, it was back during a lot more robust era. And today we are looking at just under one percent growth. So that tells you there's not a lot of room for new expansion. This is a graphic that EIA put together. And I'm going to take this opportunity to point out something new that some of you may not have seen yet. And that's today in energy. It's a feature on EIA's website. It's right in the middle of the homepage. And we do these short analytical pieces and every day there's a new piece. And this originated with some today in energy features to show what had actually happened with power generation. We go back even farther further than 1985 in some of them. But you can see that we went through the era of gas building. The yellow is gas. It says oil and gas, but those are gas fired generators. And then the first bar to the right of the dotted line is actually 2012. It's still a forecast for us because we don't have the final data. And you can see how much renewables grew. In fact, wind, we believe, added five gigawatts of capacity just in in December. And here's another graphic that shows you capacity and how much wind has outpaced natural gas in the last year. Those are capacity additions. I want to be clear about that. And this is EIA's projection for renewables in the AEO 2013. Again, this is the forecast or projection that does not incorporate extension of the PTC. I would also in response to Carol's request, explain a little bit about the criticism or defend EIA on the criticism that EIA constantly underestimates renewables growth. Well, again, the reason I mentioned that EIA's forecast have to be policy neutral and do not assume that the Congress will decide at the last minute or retroactively to provide an investment tax credit. The results have been that on these annual or bi-annual extensions at the time that the analysis is done, if there is no extension, if the EIA has to assume that a credit expires the date that it would under current law. So Chris assures me that if you actually take that into consideration and you look at the time periods where we've had a long enough extension that EIA's model is actually fairly robust when it comes to predicting renewable investment. And one last point on this. In the AEO 2013, we see renewables continuing to grow at a fast clip, wind at 17% through 2040 or no, 17% for actually, I don't have the data right in front of me, wind grew 17% this last year and solar 32%. Now they won't continue to grow at quite that same pace, but it is overall from a small base, a very high rate of growth. This gives you a sense of where the state RPS policy stand relative to the current renewables that would be eligible for participation. So in other words, aside from some regional issues or specific technologies, there's really not a lot of headroom under the state RPS policies as they are today. And this is EIA's most recent levelized cost of electricity schedule. And you can see the difference what we see in 2020 versus 2040 and part of EIA's forecast for more robust growth for renewables in the out years is the declining cost relative to all of the other technologies. And finally, this is a slide that you'll probably want to look at more closely on the website. But there has been this question about whether we're missing some of the renewables or whether we're capturing all of the investment that's been made. And EIA has federal authority to collect data from energy providers. And in some cases, large, you know, individual energy generators, and we have two different forms, the 860 and the 861, the numbers don't matter. But we've had some discussions recently with some folks in the renewables industry about how we can get better data. And we are interested in looking at making sure that our definitions are certainly adequate in capturing what we need to have supplied to EIA from the current respondents to various EIA surveys, but also looking at the possibility for some third party data where it can be verified and added to the rest of the information that we have. The surveys will be updated in, well, we'll set out a new version of it next year. And while we include storage in the surveys today, we're going to have a much greater emphasis on storage technologies in the next round so that we can also capture, hopefully, with more granularity the types of storage applications. And we hope to also supplement with this, there's a bullet here toward the bottom that says dispersed generation bucket. And that those are facilities that are not connected to the grid, they're not interconnected, and are not otherwise reported under the other, the 860 and the 861. So I will just leave you to see that online. It's too small to really look at here. And with that, I'll turn it over. Okay, great. Thank you very much, Sherwin. And I'm really glad to hear about the increased emphasis in terms of looking at energy storage and also at some of these other smaller, more dispersed renewables, because it really is difficult to get one's arms around that. And it doesn't lend itself that easily to being tracked. And so it's great that EIA is is trying to find ways to really gather that kind of information, because we know that there is a lot of those kinds of applications that are occurring across the country. So the thing is, with regard to renewables, as we think about technologies, what's kind of happening in terms of these trends, basically, where would things be going if we really didn't have a very, very active private sector was really looking at doing project financing? What are they looking for? What are the interests in terms of moving forward on that? So to discuss that whole area, we have someone who's been very, very actively engaged in this for a number of years. And so we feel very, very fortunate that Mark Fulton is here with us today. Mark is a former managing director with Deutsche Bank asset management. And he has also been on a number of financing, climate advisory committees for a number of international agencies. So we're delighted to have you with us, Mark. Thank you. So you can see from the title, I'm going to take a bit of a longer term view that maybe not for this Congress, it may be for the next one. But before I get there, I'd like to talk, I will talk about what I think, you know, the finance industry or the private sector investors expect in the next couple of years as well. And I must say that, you know, when you sit down, you say, what does finance want? You tend to be into policy immediately, because finance is still very interested in what policy is doing, because it's still very much in the policy impact is still very important to it. But I'll say one thing before I start on all of this, which is the one area I think the finance industry is right in its ballpark, which is financial engineering is securitization of debt. So I think, you know, Richard Kaufmann from the DOE, you know, this was his big thing. And I think this is a very important area. So the finance industry can make a very big difference if it can start a debt securitization market for renewables. And if it does that, it can do two things. It can bring down the cost of capital, which is very important, bring the LCOEs down, because the cost of debt will fall. But very importantly, you know, I spent years trying in effect to sell renewable financing to financial intermediaries and easy. And it would be a lot easier to walk into the fixed income departments of the major institutions and say, here go, here's a securitized debt. It's a locked up 30 year inflation hedge bond. You know, you know what's in it. I won't use the horrible letters CDO because that's dangerous, but you know what's in it. It's not a million pages of mortgages. And there you go. You don't have to worry about this renewable thing. It's not venture capital. It's good debt. That is the big breakthrough that the industry, the finance industry really needs to make. It's in its ball court. Now the problem again then is the finance industry would like credit enhancement as always to give it a go. And in Europe, you have these project bonds. If any of us are interested in this, look at European project bonds and what the EIB is trying to do because they're trying to kick this off. And I think it's going to be very important. You can't get offshore wind going in Europe without EIB support and this type of credit enhancement. So I think this is an important and very interesting area. I think finance needs to own it. They can't just keep on looking to policy makers all the time. They need to say, how can we get this debt securitization working? So having said that, let's now turn to what finance thinks about policy. And, you know, back at DB, we always had this idea of TLC, transparency, longevity and certainty. Some people call it other things, but you got to get into that. So what does finance want from policy makers? That's what they want. They want to know really how to understand the policies. They want to know they're going to be around and they want the certainty of the financing streams that come with it. We've always said that in America, TLC was a lot of the time hard to come by in particularly longevity. We've got the on-off policies in the short run. You know, we've heard about it. You get a credit, then you don't get a credit. You get it renewed. Don't you get it renewed? How do you plan? A transparency can be very murky at times. The tax equity market is not exactly the easiest thing to bet on. Now we're back into that with the PTC. So essentially, you know, but there is certainty. I'll give you this. At times you get really quite certain cash flow streams for defined periods of time and you get on with it and that's what we've got now back, I think, for a while. So what I'd like to do is to now look at just very quickly, just let's break down the story into what I call supply side incentives and demand side, a demand side framework. Supply side incentives are indeed the ITC and the PTC, basically the incentives. So we've got those in America. We've got the PTC extension, but they're on off. We've got no longevity. The transparency has gone down because we don't have the cash grant. We're back into the tax equity market, but we have some certainty that at least they're around for a while. I will say this. So here's the first thing I think that you will get asked down here, and that's what's called refundability. The industry would definitely like to think about not the cash grant, 1603, that's not going to fly, but a version of that is refundability and taxable refundability, which estimates that the tax door is 40% to 60% more efficient if you do it. And there's been some good work done on that, and I think that's an area that you're going to see financiers coming to you guys to talk about. I think then after that, the question is how do those incentives run off? And when do they run off? And again, the on off, how are we going to integrate that? That's going to be once again back on the agenda once we get into next year. Now on the demand side, as we call, we've got the RPSs. Now the RPSs give us three gigawatts a year, we estimated in an ACOR paper last year. And you can get that for 10 years, but it's still not like mega. It's helpful, but the RPSs are not going to drive a world-class scalable industry. So what are the drivers that that all brings together? I think the drivers we've heard about are massive cost reductions going on, grid parity looming in renewables in different markets. I mean, I've just been moved back to Australia and you're close to a dollar or what down there now. I can get that in the newspaper. They want to put three kilowatts in my roof for just over three grand, right? So, you know, it's like incentives. Yeah, there's a few incentives, not that many. So these costs are really coming down, big time. At the same time, if you're talking about America, the elephant in the room is a natural gas industry. I mean, in a sense, what's we're about, right? So if you don't, I believe the renewable industry does not, and finance is just always going to be comparing these, you know, am I going to do gas? Am I going to do renewables? And if we don't get that into the into the discussion, I think that's going to be a problem. It's just, it's just going to miss the whole point. And then finally, I think what I'm going to say is because we were called DB Climate Change Advisors, which when we launched in 2007 to clever name by 2011, we were wondering. But I do believe that we are seeing the resurgence or the reemergence of climate as an issue in US politics. We saw it over the election. And I actually take this president, I really take him at face value in the inauguration speech and in the victory speech in Chicago, when he basically really outlined three legacy issues, one of them being climate. I do think he thinks this is a legacy issue. And maybe he doesn't want to be 50 years from now. The guy written up the book that goes, oh, by the way, they sort of cured their debt problem, but the climate went to hell. So I think he gets that. So what I'm going to do is naively suggest to you because I'm not American. I'm not living here at the moment. That actually something will happen. And it's probably in 2015. I have to admit because why you probably need another midterm election. And then you need to get ready for the 2015 global climate negotiations, which can be absolutely crucial. That's when the Chinese and Indians have to sign up for 2020. And I think by then, you know, I think the US population will continue to be concerned about what they think is going on. So I believe that given that those those are the three big drivers, cost reductions, natural gas and an administration that I think is going to be very serious about its climate legacy. So how do you bring that all together then? You know, if you're an investor, you're looking at it going, you know what, this sounds like stuff's going to happen. You know, I think they're going to do more stuff. I think I'm going to get an opportunity to invest. Well, the first place you start, I'm afraid, is the EPA, because we wrote a lot about that last year, because that's the one thing that's given us TLC. I mean, once once you get through the courts, you know what you're dealing with. It's regulation. And if you've got a new source performance standard that means a gas plant has to be built instead of a coal plant, well, it's pretty obvious what you're dealing with. So the question, I think, for the US Congress is do they just leave it to the administration to tighten up the EPA dramatically? And I think the really interesting question I have, I've got no insight on this, but I just do wonder if we're going to see, in a sense, not just a new source performance standard, but an existing performance standard. In other words, you can get a cap. You can get a cap through the EPA. It's not nice, but you can get it. So I think the EPA is out there and it's the big challenge to the Congress, ultimately. And if this president is really keen about this and really believes the science, he's going to use the EPA. So that leaves the Congress with what? Energy policy. We haven't had an energy bill, as we all know, since the Bush administration. We didn't get one in 2010. Are we going to see an energy bill? Everyone says to me, no way, you know, this is just forget it. So what are we going to deal with? Refundability. You're going to hear, you're going to hear people asking for MLPs. You're going to hear people asking for REITs. You know, these are what I call these incremental policies, which are all good. I mean, don't get me wrong. They're all very useful. And I think this Congress will get engaged with those. But someone's got to step back and say, how am I going to deal with those three big drivers? Well, the answer is fairly obvious, but very difficult to show you mentioned to me. It's called a clean energy standard, because it incorporates gas. You can have renewable carb outs. You can make them very sophisticated and complex to try and deal with the state distribution, trading credits and so on. So there's a lot you can do with the CES. But the reason why I feel so strongly that it's got to be looked at again is you need a framework to deal with those forces. If you just keep tackling it incrementally, you're going to hear a little bit here, a little bit there. And the industry gets confused. And the private finance says, well, I'm not really sure. I've got this today. I'll do it, but I don't know about tomorrow. Am I really going to build an industry on that? Am I really going to build a securitization market if I'm not really sure if there's a long term plan? So I do think the CES is a very useful framework for tackling that. You've got gas in it. You can put your nukes in it. Now, why would you have a carve out for renewable? By that, I'm in a target. So here's the next, I think, big point that we all need to work on, which is renewables are a price hedge against gas. That's really what the game is going to be about. Now, how do you value that price hedge? If you use a blackened shoals, very sophisticated volatility model, you're never going to come up with a good number because you're just picking up short term vol. What you've got to do is to say, what happened in California in the dash to gas in 1999-2000? Well, they dashed for gas and the whole system collapsed when the price took off. So you've got to be some sort of shock analysis. So I believe that the CES, if it came, could justify a serious carve out for renewables above the RPS targets on the basis of diversifying the system and diversifying the price risk on gas. So I think that's going to become a much more strong argument. So I think at the end of that, I actually did have a few points, which is that I think right now we're going to have a very strong renewables. But we don't know what we're going to look like in two years again when the PTC rolls off. So it's too much on off. The CES with a newable carve out I think is a good long term framework to integrate the grid parity transition. I think you can actually get to that. And I make the point that the US administration can meet its climate targets and look very good in 2015. And at that point, the Chinese are the only emitter in the room. I mean, everyone else is irrelevant. Chinese coal is the only issue for the climate. So the Chinese can be put into a very, very difficult position. I think and I think this administration knows that and can do that. So I think there's a really good message here. I think America's got some good short term policies. It's going to keep growing at the moment, but it does need a transition to a longer term framework. The CES has been tried, and it's not easy, but it could be tried again. And I'm going to make naive forecast in 2015 that there will be a resurgence in all these policies and there will be an effort to do an energy bill. And I think the investment markets at that point really become solid and long term. I think the securitization of debt can take off. And I think that we can provide the finance that's needed. Thanks. And we'll have to have Mark come back to see what really happens. So thank you very, very much, Mark. And also as part of the whole story, it's important to look at what is happening across the globe. What's happening with regard to our economic competitors in other countries with regard to renewables. So we've heard a lot about renewables in the US. But to help us look at renewables in an international context, I am very pleased to introduce Dr. Robert Icord Jr., who is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Energy Resources at the US Department of State. The Bureau of Energy is a rather new part of the Department of State. And I think that it helps us recognize how important energy is as we think about its role in international relations and how important it is in terms of thinking about how it drives everybody's economy around the globe. Good afternoon. Thank you very much, Carol. It's a pleasure to be here. I talked to the energy regulators at NAIRUG this morning. So if any of you are there, you'll hear some of the similar comments that I made this morning. But indeed, there's a lot happening in the international scene. And the US, in a sense, is profoundly influenced by it, even though we, in a sense, we are moving toward improving our energy security and reducing our dependence on foreign energy. As you know, there was a transition yesterday at the State Department with Senator Kerry now, Secretary. And but Secretary Clinton, one of her many legacies was the creation of an Energy Resources Bureau. And her vision was clear that energy was going to be a more important element in our foreign policy. If you haven't seen it, her speech at Georgetown on October 8th was, I think, a remarkable document in laying out the vision of energy's role in our diplomacy in the 21st century. I wanted to say a few words about the bureau. Our mission is a broad one. We deal with many different aspects, but it's structured along three major missions. One is sort of the world of today managing the difficult energy markets. And we all know Brent Crude was $116 yesterday. The issues related to Iran's sanctions and the oil markets have profound impact on all the technologies that we're talking about, even though the trends that Steve was talking about in terms of reduction of cost are, in a sense, important drivers as well. And so this is a major focus of the bureau. But I lead the second team on energy transformation. And so we're taking a view as to how do we move toward a world that has cleaner and more efficient energy systems? A major emphasis, of course, in today's digital world is electricity and electric power, which a lot of the world has, and a lot of the world doesn't really have. And sufficient quantities are reliability. So that's an important aspect that we're focused on. And third is sort of a cross-cutting area that is really important to the international energy market. That's really related to governance and access, the way countries manage their resources, the allocation to benefit their people, the transparency, accountability of institutions and companies. So that's sort of a new dimension. But I think that the bureau as a whole tries to bring these together in an integrated way, work with our colleagues in the Department of Energy, AIID, OPIC, and the trade agencies, MCC, et cetera, to try to craft a more efficient and more effective international engagement around the world. I think there were five propositions that I wanted to throw out for your consideration today that I think are important as we look at this future. One is that future energy growth will take place in the non-OECD world largely, and major improvements in the institutional policy, institutional regulatory systems are urgently needed to mobilize the investments required to provide the supply and demand project requirements. Second is that we have creating financially and commercially viable utilities are a critical priority if the electricity systems are to serve the burgeoning needs resulting from income population growth and urbanization. Third, that economic growth and the expansion of renewable energy, which I'll talk about, as well as non-renewable energy, into more diverse and complex systems is going to require stronger transmission systems, effective regulation and transparent and efficient markets. I think that many of that holds true for the U.S. as well as globally. Fourth, that the world must give greater urgency to providing the electricity and modern fuels to the over 1.3 billion people that do not have access to electricity and over 2 billion that don't have access to modern cooking fuels. And this is especially in sub-Saharan Africa and in South Asia. And last, that at least cost in environmentally sustainable development should take place, should place greater emphasis on promoting regional electricity and gas networks and regulatory harmonization that will help to create larger and more attractive markets and allow the exploitation of the diverse renewable energy potential that you find in many regions such as Africa, Latin America and Asia, where you have in a sense abundant renewable energy. So these, the next slides I'll try to go through quickly because we're running out of time so we can have some discussion. Here you can see the burgeoning energy growth and what is obvious India and China with India actually surpassing China and population before 2030. So it's, we have to deal with those countries and we have through our Department of Energy and State Department and other agencies strong programs in both India and China. Population growth, again Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, huge growth in population from current levels. The scary thing is that urbanization is just beginning in some of these regions and you can see in Asia you know you're still right now you're less than you're less than 50% urban and even in 2035 for you know you're going to be in a sense just over 50% urban. So I mean having worked in this business for a long time including in the 70s and 80s in Asia it's amazing going back and seeing all the growth in urbanization and the implications of that. You know one figure that stands out is that you know they say in India 70% of the buildings in place in 2030 haven't been built yet. So you can see that not only are renewables but really energy efficiency and the opportunities to try to mitigate some of that growth are absolutely critical priorities in terms of dealing with this burgeoning situation. I won't dwell on this we've heard about it before the falling price of renewables. PV is obviously been very very evident over the last couple of years and a lot of that of course is China. You know I heard in Abu Dhabi a few weeks ago that people including Chinese companies are saying that the surplus of PV on the world market is 40 gigawatts. How much did we add last year? Three gigawatts in the US? I mean you know it's enormous and 70 worldwide. So I mean you know I don't know that may be a little inflated but in a sense it is enormous and that means that it's going to be a while before those supply demand curves meet. So we have a certainly environment of falling prices for the next couple of years. Brazil and other countries we're seeing tenders now on wind that are where you have really good wind resources down in the five to seven sense of kilowatt hour level. So I mean with international oil prices and gas prices tied to oil in many cases especially in Asia and outside the US where you don't have Henry Hub prices you know there's enormous incentives for people to substitute renewables. And you know average cost we met with the vice president of Tanzania this morning you know he says well our cost of 45 cents a kilowatt hour per power you know island states average 33 cents a kilowatt hour in the island states which are very based on oil and diesel. I mean there are lots of opportunities to substitute and countries are increasingly pursuing that 120 countries now have some kind of renewable energy policy or target. So it's really taking off because we're in this kind of you know environment where in a sense the energy security the economic growth requirements and the environmental security issues that Dennis mentioned are important. Investment requirements here in a sense this issue of and here's the IEA projections of investment requirements for electricity generation alone even more of course if we add transmission and distribution. So in non-OECD countries five trillion dollars and of which renewables is estimated on the new policy scenario to be as much as three trillion now that may even be conservative with regards to the growth because it assumes fairly low rates of energy growth electricity growth. I mean you know countries like China and India you're having growth that's seven eight percent. And one of the interesting things too is that in this one hydro is still in a sense a major contributor. But I'm terribly concerned having done measurements of glacier melt in Kyrgyzstan and places like that that the reliability of a lot of this hydro is very questionable. So it's not just a question of intermittency of the renewables and how to integrate that but it's also an issue that the hydrological cycle is really a factor in Brazil's facing enormous problems right now in terms of their hydro dependence etc. So I think that this the anticipated contribution of hydro in a sense worries me and but clearly we see enormous increases in wind and PV. We've got to be concerned about the poor and the people that don't have access to issue energy. This is a important foreign policy issue with regards to energy and the political and economic stability of countries. And it's 48 billion a year estimated for off grid and mini grids and in roll electrification extension. About nine now is going into this area. How do we mobilize investments in this area and how do we get the private sector more engaged? Well in a sense Mark talked a little bit about this issue of risk. I mean it's a problem because you know you talk to the banks now and you know they don't see these investment grade projects and they're under a lot of constraints with regards to increasing the financing. We we're trying to look at this issue both in terms of the large project finance which is where you can develop through power purchase agreements and guarantee mechanisms you can provide you reduce some of those risk. For the smaller projects and the off grid projects we really need new business and financial models that that try to bundle projects and ensure quality so that we don't end up with junk projects like more the mortgage market and can begin to interest interest banks and and develop local banking capacity in this area. So this is one of our priorities. This shows some of the applications for the off grid kinds of projects all of which can be made met by renewables educational applications health market grinding water pumping all of these are well suited for for for renewables and and this is from the World Bank which of course is very interested in pursuing this government role. I'm sorry I'm running out of time but the government role subsidies obviously have been a key area and jumpstarting the industry in Europe and China and India and other markets in the US has had its approach to this which has been more market oriented than than others but and I think that that but it in a sense the cost of of that is becoming clear and Europe is backing away from the feed in tariffs moving more toward tenders just yesterday in Germany there was an announcement to temporarily spin feed in tariffs you know so you've got in a sense a lot of rethinking about this issue and who's going to bear the cost of this because in Germany for instance you've got over twenty five euro cents a kilowatt hour household energy cost and so it's it's quite a quite a factor in influencing their interest and and and the competitiveness aspect. The problem that we have to overcome in many countries as I was mentioning was that the utilities are really financially weak and that adds to the risk factor that you know when you have thirty percent losses in the system and you know from both technical and theft and you know unaccounted losses this in a sense needs to be dealt with because if you're going to really finance the huge investments needed. India we've seen an example of that with the six hundred million people that were blacked out last summer you know as a result of both the problems of the utility management investments the need for greater transmission system integration and you know it's a big challenge in a country that's growing so rapidly as India but it's an example of where you need to work on the system as a whole. Two initiatives that we are actively involved in working with DOE and other agencies is the Connect 2022 which is an effort to try to develop in a sense a regional over ten years a regional transmission interconnection system for the western hemisphere that can take advantage of these diverse resources and to improve the economic viability and begin to substitute for some of the high-cost thermal power. You can see the high tariffs that are in many of these markets and you have tremendous hydro geothermal wind resources in the region. And then finally the UN Secretary General's initiative on sustainable energy for all has been an area that we in DOE in particular have been working on that relates to the access issue that I talked about trying to achieve universal electricity access by 2030 doubling the rate of improvement of energy efficiency to about one point four to two point eight percent a year and doubling the share of renewables. So these are ambitious goals but and they're aspirational in context so now we'll have a process to try to apply those in individual country context and regional context over 60 countries have expressed interest in participating this will gear up over the next couple months. There's also cross-cutting areas such like innovative financing to address some of the issues that Mark was talking about. Bank of America has been very much involved and has pledged 50 billion dollars over the next 10 years. We'll see what kind of projects they're able actually able to do with that money but in a sense and Secretary Clinton pledged about two billion dollars from FY 11 monies to deal with both the technical assistance the technology policy cooperation and partnership and the mobilizing financing. I think it's instructive to say that you know OPEC funding and FY 11 was $1.2 billion for renewable energy so there's been enormous increase in the demand for that financing from OPEC so anyway that's an overview and thank you very much. Obviously lots more to talk about and I'm sure that there are a lot of questions but if you could ask your questions as concisely as possible so that we could take a few remaining moments to take advantage of our expert speakers. Are there any questions? If you could identify yourself please. All these people and no questions? Amazing. Okay over here. I'm Sam Bonham with Congressman Roe Blumenauer. As the tech continues to mature when you start especially for Steve but when you start transitioning to these innovative sort of moving innovation towards the demand side and the financing side? Okay actually could you just repeat that it's a little hard to hear up here in terms of talking about transferring to the demand side? As the technology matures as technology continues to mature when does the DOE and other organizations start transitioning more and to what extent to the demand side for innovation and financing like what Mark talked about and what Robert also did? Well as Mark talked about we're doing that now I think the transitioning is happening and Richard Kaufman who was at the Department of Energy started looking at different mechanisms, financial mechanisms like real estate, investment trusts, other folks are looking at the master limited partnership, things like that. I think Mark alluded to that's just sort of a couple of tools in the toolbox not a holistic approach but that transitioning is happening right now where we see you know we've had a lot of success over the last 30 years of doing this R&D so we're shifting our emphasis we still have a lot of investment in R&D to continue to come down the cost curve because we haven't quite hit parity in a lot of these technologies a lot of these technologies still have a ways to go I kind of showed the whole gambit of what we're working on but I think naturally you'll start to see more and more involvement in the policy side and looking at some of the financial barriers so we can scale these technologies. I would just add that the innovation cycle is continuous and new technology will continue to evolve at various stages some of it early some of it ready for deployment and the refreshment of it is going to be similar to what happened with information technology. Can we say hey we're finished with information technology let's freeze the problem we have really good affordable capable information technology devices and software no same thing is true for energy and renewable energy we're going to continue to see upgrades we're going to see prices continue to come down we're going to see greater resiliency and different applications and it's going to happen in a very very diverse way there isn't any one single thing wind or solar hydro whatever it'll be all of the above in various forms depending on where in the world we're in the country we're going to best apply that value proposition. Okay great other questions. Okay thank you first. Go ahead. My question is for surely I noticed that in your projection waste seems to to be stable is that because like methane and municipal waste is that going into biomass? It's not increasing at all over time. Can you speak to that Chris? I know that's a factor. What we're modeling there is the opportunities for new landfill gas and well the opportunities that are there relatively in a sense is there's a lot of volume of opportunity. I've heard the United States described as the Saudi Arabia of solid municipal waste and so make no mistake there's gold in them there piles and we are going to be able through increasing development and mostly deployment of existing technologies to harvest the value out of that all forms of waste municipal waste agricultural waste industrial waste and things that previously were thought to be a liability are becoming real assets. Carol mentioned the role of waste energy recovery especially in large thermally intense industries we're going to see more of that combined heat and power residential industrial commercial and this is really gold that is waiting to be mined across our economic and social landscape. Great I think there is enormous potential as Denny just said in terms of looking at whether it is our farms wastewater treatment facilities in terms of taking the methane out of that capturing that and using that for power or for fuel you know there's sort of an amazing variety of things and I think one of the important things also for us all to remember is that within each renewable resource they each have a variety of different technologies so that for example with regard to geothermal it's a question of whether you're generating power you can use it directly in terms of providing heat in terms of thermal loads or geodexchange heat pumps and you look at solar same kinds of thing biomass in terms of many many different kinds of applications so it's really really exciting in terms of all of the different opportunities that there are that we're seeing in a lot of different places. Right here in Washington at the Blue Plains water treatment plant there's good methane electricity production project going in solar as well. Right and might also mention that the president had signed an executive order with regard to combine heat and power so that was referenced Denny referenced that so that is something else that I think we're already seeing huge gains made in that. Shirley did you want to comment on that? From the slides that I used on page 7 we do show and one thing to keep in mind the potential resource in it is for a lot of these technologies you can't just you know extrapolate based on the fact that people think that a lot of things can happen until they are actually happening so that's right. Well that brings us back to what other folks were saying on the panel with regard to policy and finance and what is involved in terms of helping provide the transparency, the certainty with regard to making those private sector decisions. Okay other questions here first and then over here okay. Hi thank you very much my name is Zachary I'm with Senator Martin Heinrich's office. One of the things I've been looking at with regards to solar energy in New Mexico is one of the challenges has been getting transmissions lines being able to transmit the solar energy to reach the homes. I'm just curious where are we with regards to transporting that solar energy where we are in terms of innovation what's needed and what you think the next step is to keep up the growth in solar energy. Thank you. I would say that in the sighting decisions that many developers are making transmission accessibility either existing transmission capability or capacity or the shortest distance between point A and point B is increasingly a key factor. It's true that many of the locations geographically of where viable renewable energy wind and concentrated solar especially exist aren't necessarily heavily populated so you got to get the power to where it's needed. That is going to be done through a very deliberate process of site selection and also some transmission build out. Technologically there is a lot of work going on globally and starting more in the United States to get the higher capacity transmission through high voltage DC or direct current lines that can connect major hubs if you will of energy supply and demand. There is not likely though in my view in the next say ten years to be any huge breakthrough in this regard. That said distributed generation where you put a micro grid in areas that don't necessarily have to rely as much on central power plants far distant from where the electricity or the heat is needed make a lot of sense. We are starting to see the Department of Defense deploy net zero bases for example and that can easily transfer into net zero communities using microgrids in a variety of energy supply sources including municipal power from a central utility or natural gas or biomass or sun, wind, what have you and we are starting to see here the mega trend of our energy system developing as it is with more and more renewables meet information technology the so-called smart grid and it isn't the grid that we know and love or know and hate sometimes now it's the grid that is happening using microgrids as well. I think it's worth saying in the US context that FERC has made some good moves on interconnection which I think is very useful and again those sort of micro things can make quite a big difference so I think that was good and I'm just going to throw in by 2050 if solar from the deserts isn't playing a big base load then I don't think this stuff works so they're going to have to get the transmission lines out into those deserts and I think they can do that and then you've got vast potential solar thermal base load. Could I just? Sure. Go ahead. One thing that might be of interest to you in this regard to siting of new facilities relative to infrastructure are some new maps that EIA has just posted on the state portal and you can take those layers that Steve was talking about that were developed by NREL and you can look at where the solar resource or wind or you can combine them although that's a little busy but you can look at your state or your district and then you can also add on a layer of infrastructure. Right now you can only look at the electricity transmission grid at the state level because we don't own the data but we'll be if you're interested and let the appropriators know that this might be a useful thing to have. We may have the resources to do more in that area but right now you can look at the infrastructure, most of the built energy infrastructure in your state and pick and choose different layers to compare again so you can look at transmission and other types of generation etc. and the resource layers not just renewable but fossil as well. If I could add to that so the NREL report does kind of map out where the transmission has to happen for large utility scale generation in remote areas could be solar, thermal, CSP plants. Our Office of Electricity I think Sarah can help you get in contact with them. They can give you a briefing. They're really in charge of this area trying to look at all the authorities that DOE has as well as working together for siting. As I mentioned also we have under the council for environmental quality a rapid response team led by a DOE colleague Laura Morton that could fill in on how we're trying to speed up the time frame of transmission for those federal projects so we think it's really critical and then again there is renewables I want to re-emphasize that renewables aren't only dependent on transmission build out because of all the things we can do at the distribution level in terms of controlling loads as well as distributed energy, electric vehicles and so forth so all that can be integrated perhaps cut down on the amount of transmission we think we may need to get those high penetration levels. Great and sure go ahead Bob. Just one quick comment from the international perspective in my discussions with the Chinese power grid as well as the Russians, I mean clearly there is a lot of attention on Sun's high capacity transmission lines so I think we're going to have to keep focusing on this issue and try to learn from them but also try to stay ahead of the game clearly they're making major investments and have a lot of, especially the Russians have a lot of experience in these long distance lines. Great, okay go ahead. Thank you very much panel. My name is Chris Simmerman I'm doing my doctorate on transforming global energy industry leaders thoughts on how they should bring renewable energies into the market system. I also work at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization by the allied command transformation done in Norfolk, Virginia. Kind of a question encompassing everybody is, I've read a book called Transforming Global Energy by Matt Slarson, it was published in 2009 and he kind of equates taking renewable energies and transforming the global energies system across the globe and equates it to what the US did with the Manhattan project, what the US did with putting a man on the moon and I just wanted to ask what sort of stuff do we need to do as a nation or in conjunction with our international partners that Dr. Eichor talked about to bring renewable energy as a source of national pride or bring it together as a source of international pride as we look at partnerships to make sure that we move in that right direction to create more of an urgency, a sense of urgency to get renewable energies into our systems more than the 13% to 16% that Shirley mentioned over a period of 27 years, sorry, 27 more years. So I don't think it's moving fast enough from my perspective and that's kind of the general gist of my dissertation topic, but from your vast knowledge and vast experience as a panel and anybody here really, what do we need to do to make this something on the same lines of the Manhattan project and putting a man on the moon? Thank you. Okay. Does everybody want to make a comment? So we'll start with Steve and work our way down. Okay, I'll just make a few comments. I think it's a lot harder, number one, because the government's not necessarily the customer like it was for some of the projects you mentioned. So we have to deal with market realities. We have to deal with the fact that and I think the EIA can validate this that we don't really have a lot of growth in the electricity sector, right? So things have to be retired. We have realities of the infrastructure of energy projects being rather long in terms of how long they're in the inventory and how often they flip over, you know, the whole asset turnover is very long. So I think it's very, very tough challenge and I think it really comes down to, again, the idea, can you clear all these market barriers, have the financial mechanisms and have the prosperity, then people in the market will make those choices. So it's not something that you can just kind of, you know, with all those realities in play there, it becomes a very, very difficult and quite frankly, I think it's going to be, take decades to do this. That doesn't mean we don't do it urgently because there's a huge economic prize here. We've seen countries like China beating us in solar. So there's a huge gain. So we got to be urgent and aggressive about it. But at the same time, there's those realities. Okay, Shirley, did you want to? Well, Steve's point, first off, that the federal government doesn't totally control this is very important. The federal government doesn't really build energy infrastructure in the United States. It's a series of a lot of the virtual actors. And yes, energy efficiency has been very successful in various programs. You can see what's happened with the growth and power agreement, productivity and use of energy has increased dramatically. So there's not a lot of space in the world. And so you've got a complex environment that I think people have spoken to about what's needed. A few points. First of all, I think the United States actually is a bit of a leader here through ARPA-E. And also the DOE's work with the MEPH, they're very active in trying to get these global best practice groups going. I think they've done a very good job on that. And if ARPA-E makes a breakthrough with storage technology, which they're, you know, who is, then, some big stuff. So I think that's the first point that, you know, innovation is still America's strength. So we did a paper once that showed how if America leads the innovation, the Chinese build it, I'm afraid. So don't worry about the jobs. But if the Chinese build it and Americans innovate, we might actually get a global salute. That's actually what's happening, of course. And don't forget the German consumer has just gone to break, funded it all. But so essentially, I think it can be done. But I'll point, in terms of just, you know, a few years ago, we really got behind the gas revolution here as a green group. Why? Because we did, there's no way you can get on top of the climate without a massive gas switch out of coal, fast. And it's starting here. If it doesn't happen in China, we just, it's just, everything else is irrelevant. So they can never build the renewables that fast enough, I'm afraid, even if they build 100 gigawatts a year, whatever. So they're going to have to do the gas switch out there. And, you know, just come from Australia, they're building $200 billion worth of trains, you know, because they want to go supply that and I guarantee you, somewhere out there, the United States is just going to play in the Asian gas markets with its pracking gas. So I think, you know, I'm an optimist because if we can use the gas transition, that can bias 20 years to do what we need to do on the renewable cost curves. And I go back to, I've got a bit of an obsession about base load renewable because, you know, we're meant to be building this incredibly smart grid, which will somehow be fabulous and there'll be cars and batteries and everything. Well, maybe, you know, live in hope. But I do know that if you get a really very, very big central power station in the desert that's using solar thermal and is really using some of the new ceramics they'll use to store the heat probably for over 24 hours, you're getting very close to base load. So for me, I'd like to see what, and buy a biomass, I mean, we've got to have renewable base load as well as renewable intermittent. And then we've got to get the batteries, and it's going to take 20 years, but the gas can buy us that time. That's why I think there's this synergy. Well, I think the equation is a little bit different depending on your region, like in Middle East, clearly there's a lot of incentive to substitute renewables for both oil and gas. But I think that I come back to some extent to the, to today's technology that allows us to enter into these public and private partnerships and really develop a campaign to really deal with the broad global population as we've seen the power of cell phone technologies in terms of the Arab Spring and other kinds of things. So that, you know, and, you know, and last year we invited the rock band Lincoln Park to the State Department. And because, you know, they're really adamant about trying to push renewable energy, a sustainable energy area. And you know, at Rio they had 50 million hits on their website and they're going to do concerts in Africa and everything to raise money for it. So I think the public-private partnership aspect is not only just the corporate side, it's really a broader coalition that we need to pursue this objective. I think the historical analogies of the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project aren't appropriate here because in those cases there was urgent national security problems to be solved, space race, and of course World War II in the case of the Manhattan Project. That's not the case here. A better analogy might be what happened post the Great Depression in 1929 where all of the, there was a lot of public and private partnerships that took place to slowly but surely increase the quality of life and the industrial capacity, etc. It is going to be driven by the private sector primarily, but the private sector is having a hard time getting over some of the speed bumps that are created by public policy. And that public policy is influenced by other parts of the private sector called the incumbents. So you have the American Petroleum Institute to name names that are willing to lay down on the tracks in front of the renewable fuel standard that is ready to produce tremendous benefit to the United States in terms of fuel diversity, rural development, environmental benefits, the list goes on and on. So the power of the incumbents especially felt up here on the hill because of our political dynamic, can't be ignored. So why, how do you get over those speed bumps or eliminate them? You go with facts, you go with real value, you say for every element of energy in that portfolio, whether it's transportation energy or electricity, what are the true costs? What are the true benefits and what are the true risks of each element of it? And we're seeing more and more that as good as the fossil age has been to us, it's starting to have more liabilities, so we are aware of more liabilities than including global warming and climate change than we were before. We need to use that knowledge as objectively as we can to make better choices in terms of the kinds of policies that will remove the speed bumps and accelerate it. It's not a question of having the technology, we've got it, we've got good technology now, we've got even better stuff coming down to pipe sunshots, a good example. We've got plenty of money, we are a very, very rich country with lots of investors sitting on the side looking for some place to put their money that's going to give them a return better than a CD at less than one percent and we need to have the right kinds of policies at the federal, state and local levels to really accelerate this. Lastly, we could have this whole thing accelerated if and that indeed. We were to encounter a real crisis and we possibly could. We saw a glimpse of this with Superstorm Sandy in 2005, Katrina. That could accelerate our, focus our attention more on alternatives that would not require us to diminish, in fact increase our economic growth and quality of life but do it in a way that is so much more sustainable without all of the downside risks. And we will be looking at some of those issues at future EESI briefings in terms of what it means for resilience and communities. I think that we are going to be seeing more of that and we certainly know that offices up here are very interested in finding ways to really do a better job of protecting their communities and their states. But I'm going to let that be the last word and I want to thank our speakers very, very much for wedding everybody's appetite and there are many more conversations that we should have with regard to these issues. Please feel free to be in touch with any of us with questions or your comments and again the presentations will all be up on EESI's website if not tonight certainly by tomorrow. And I just add that this is an appetizer course. The main course is going to happen tomorrow beginning at 8 o'clock over in the Cannon Caucus Room for our national renewable energy policy day. Tremendous bipartisan representation there, business, finance, technology and you're all welcome to join us over there at the Cannon Caucus Room and as Carol said we'll be back up here in partnership with follow on briefings. So thank you all very, very much for coming and again thanks to our wonderful, wonderful panel. Really appreciate it.