 Okay, this is our final panel for our policy forum today, but it doesn't diminish the importance of what these speakers are going to talk about at all, and we are going to be looking at the whole issue of fuel cells in this session, and hopefully you all have gone by and have seen the booths for these organizations, and of course, fuel cells also are an important technology that they have many, many applications and attributes, in terms of thinking about very stable, reliable, quiet power generation that can be done in terms of a whole variety of different sizes and applications, both in terms of stationary as well as mobile sources. So it provides lots and lots of flexibility, provides, it's an example of one we were talking about energy storage earlier, fuel cells are an important piece in terms of being able to do that as well. So to start us off, in this session we will hear from Ryan Skacowsky, who is a policy analyst for BTI Fuel Cells 2000. Thank you Carol and welcome everybody to the last but certainly not least event this afternoon. For some of you I think fuel cells need no introduction, but for others you might not be familiar. Basically a fuel cell is an energy device that converts fuel to electricity through an electrochemical pathway. Electrochemical of course means no combustion, no combustion means low noise, far fewer harmful emissions, quiet profile, useful emissions in the form of heat and water, both of which can be recycled in a fuel cell and improve the overall efficiency. If you think of a fuel cell as one stack, you can be scaled up. So anywhere from a few watts to multi-megawatt systems, fuel cells are highly scalable and I want to introduce the notion right off the bat, fuel cells have long since left the lab. These are technologies that are here and now and are finding traction in specific markets. In the U.S. there's really three main markets that are really taking off. So big companies, big systems, for example Coca-Cola has one in their bottling facility, companies are using them in data centers, Walmart has 27 retail sites with fuel cells at the moment. Another example of a market is telecom backup. These are fuel cells that are backing up stationaries, systems out in remote areas, deserts, forests. And last but not least you have fuel cell forklifts which the U.S. is currently a world leader in this technology application. There are thousands in the U.S. right now, in fact in the past month you have major companies announcing even more fuel cells. Procter & Gamble is getting 200 for the three of their facilities, BMW is getting 300 of their own. So these are major application areas in the United States. There's progress on the vehicle side, automakers such as Toyota, Honda, Hyundai are all reaffirming their commitments to 2015 as a launch date for fuel cell technology. We're seeing stations pop up in states like New York, Connecticut, California. And it's not just passenger vehicles but it's also fuel cell buses that are taking off. A UTC power bus just passed a thousand operating hours out in California which is not an insignificant number. Fuel cells are finding new sources of venture capital. Just in the past year alone we have a growth of 276 percent worldwide growth of venture capital in fuel cell companies. In the U.S. that number is over 500 percent. So they're finding investment, big companies are taking them on, they're getting on board. So like I said these are not technologies of the future, they're here today. I want to sort of jump ahead and introduce something else, another notion to you which is that fuel cells don't necessarily have to work alone though they are capable of it. In fact fuel cells are a team player with other technologies, they're an ideal technology enhancer for renewables as well as non-renewable technologies. In the U.S. you have systems right now where fuel cells are either co-located or integrated with wind, Adobe, we all know Adobe. Their headquarters is powered by a mix of solar and, I'm sorry, fuel cells and six wind turbines that help it achieve a measure of grid independence. Grocery stores such as Whole Foods and Safeway have adopted a dual solar fuel cell model, again achieving grid independence. Apple just recently announced that they're going to have a four megawatt fuel cell paired with a 20 megawatt solar installation at their Maiden data center in North Carolina which houses among other things their cloud services. So these are obviously major companies taking this technology on and in the applications where there are dual systems the fuel cell helps to solve the intermittency problem with renewable energy. Sun is not always shining, the wind is not always blowing, but fuel cells provide a stable base load power supply, hardening grid independence. Fuel cells can help batteries as well. Orgiprotonics is a company that manufactures a forklift which has an on-board battery but the fuel cell supplies the electricity to power that forklift. So they're not just only hydrogen power, they're also a mix of renewables there too. And in perhaps the coolest installation in my opinion is the Santa Rita Jail out in California. This is one of the biggest jails in the United States. I think it might be the fourth largest jail prison facility. They have, and I wrote it down, solar panels, 1.2 megawatts worth of solar panels, five wind turbines, a one megawatt fuel cell, and a lithium ion battery bank that stores the power generated from all sources. And most importantly they also have a disconnect switch which allows removal from the grid and that can help in two ways. One it can help achieve cheaper power when the grid, during peak hours when the electricity is expensive, when the nighttime comes, electricity is cheaper, they go back on the grid and they generate power that way. It's all stored by the battery. So this system allows in this case a continuity of a critical public service and in other applications a grocery store their critical service is keeping the food fresh. So untold benefits that these combined systems are providing. And these show that fuel cells are complementary. They're not competitive with these other technologies. And I'd be remiss not to mention natural gas in this equation too, talking about these other technology areas. Because at the moment fuel cells run primarily off natural gas. It's an ideal partner really. It's a cleaner pathway for using natural gas. High end efficiencies for combined heat and power with fuel cells are, the high end is 95% companies have reported efficiencies with a combined cycle gas turbine you're looking at 60% at the max. So this is another application that fuel cells can really enhance natural gas as another technology. So as you can hopefully see, fuel cells aren't enhancer. They're not a competitor. They're going to play a vital role in the energy portfolio going forward. And just from a competitiveness standpoint, the U.S. is a world leader in this technology. And we have the most, we have a lot of fuel cell companies that are headquartered here. We've maintained a commanding lead over patents over the past few years. There's strong public-private partnerships with the university and industry here. But make no mistake, there's countries at our heels. I mean, they are vying for leadership, companies like Germany, Japan, South Korea. All of which would like to take the mantle from the United States. So we need to think of this technology as an American one and one that we have a significant investment in. And as a final thought, fuel cells offer us a choice. And as Americans, more broadly, we value choice and flexibility in the services we receive on a daily basis. And I just ask you the question, why should our energy be any different? I've kind of rushed through, so if you have any other questions, our website is www.fuelcells.org, and you can find me at ryanatfuelcells.org. So feel free to email me any questions you might have. Great, thank you, Ryan. Good job in providing a good run-through and some great examples of how this technology is being used. And actually, one of my favorite examples from years ago was learning about a credit card, or I should say a bank that processed credit card transactions in Omaha. And they had a couple fuel cells in order to be able to provide reliability, because as they told me, you know, it's not like we can afford to reboot so that they needed, they just could not afford any downtime and the fuel cells gave them the quality assurance, the reliability that they needed with regard to all these financial transactions. So now we're going to hear from James Warner, who is the Director of Policy and External Affairs with the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association. Great. Good afternoon. I am indeed the last speaker of the day, but normally I have to worry about people wanting to get to other places, given that the air conditioner is here, and what's going on outside. I mean, we can spend a nice long time together talking fuel cells. My name is James Warner. I'm the Director of Policy and External Affairs for the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association. We are the trade association for the industry, combining, we have members across the gamut of the industry from hydrogen suppliers and fuel cell manufacturers to analytical organizations like Fuel Cells 2000, as well as national labs, major automakers, and so forth. I am here to present you with a sort of an overview of the state of the industry. This is the Expo's 15th year, and I daresay that when the Expo started, a lot of the successes of this industry were probably at the bench or in the lab. And that's not the case now, as Ryan said. We are now an industry that is making an impact in the marketplace today, and we're poised for wider commercialization in the very near future. I think you'll hear a lot of similar things between what I'm going to say and what Ryan said, which is basically we're here, we're commercializing or commercialized. The U.S. has the lead, and we'd better keep it. That would be, I think, both of our messages in a nutshell. We hear a lot about all of the above energy strategy today. I think we've had the experience that this means different things depending on who you're speaking to. But whatever definition of it I've heard, fuel cells fit into it as the all of the above energy technology, using both renewable and fossil fuels, integrating with traditional means of energy production and transmission, as well as new and intermittent ones. And this is the last clean energy technology in which the U.S. has a manufacturing and technical lead, the last clean energy technology. Solar batteries, wind turbines, we had the intellectual property lead, we had the manufacturing lead in those technologies, and those industries are not essentially located in the United States anymore. Fuel cells still are, but it's not something that we can just rest on our heels. The competition is fierce from South Korea in particular, who we just signed a free trade agreement with, Japan, Germany, and others. We'll talk about that in a little bit in a second. Looking at the marketplace of 2012 and beyond, we can see that the first wave of our products is gaining commercial traction, even as we continue as an industry to lower costs, improve performance, and gain greater market acceptance. Independent analysts, you can find this good news sort of around the world, including from fuel cells 2000. We're a billion-dollar industry, more than 25,000 employees worldwide, about I think between 10 and 15,000 in the United States. One of the fastest growing clean energy sectors with 10.3% annual growth. Fuel cell shipments overall have increased by 40% in 2010 compared to 2009, and the markets for fuel cells are growing. They're not growing as quickly in the United States as they are around the world, but the markets for fuel cells are growing and exports are reflecting that. And despite a challenging business and economic environment, demand for fuel cell products is increasing, and these are large, multi-billion-dollar markets. The Korean government, which wants to run Seoul 50% off fuel cells by 2030, estimates the potential market for fuel cells to be $126 billion. The auto market for fuel cell electric vehicles could be worth $15 billion by 2020, and sales are forecast to grow to $2.6 billion in the next five or six years in both portable power and stationary power generation. Companies that try fuel cells return for more. Some of the largest corporations in the world are our customers. Walmart, Coca-Cola, AT&T, Whole Foods are just a few of them that use, in some cases, both stationary fuel cells and fuel cell forklift installations. Just yesterday, eBay announced that it's building a new data center in Utah, which will be powered by six megawatts of Bloom Energy fuel cells. A couple of, about a month ago, Apple had made an announcement that it was going to build a five megawatt installation of Bloom Energy fuel cells. At the time, that was the largest non-utility installation of fuel cells in North America. The eBay installation will now eclipse that by a megawatt, which is great. And this is part of their plan to integrate fuel cells into their data centers around the country. And it's also providing not only an opportunity for fuel cells, but for biogas. Because as these fuel cells are put in places by companies that want to meet renewable portfolio standards, if they're not directly fueled by biogas, they are paying for biogas projects to essentially offset the natural gas that they might consume. Hydrogen fueling has become routine in the United States. Hydrogen is, that's how we get sulfur out of our gasoline. So commercial hydrogen is produced and trucked and piped around the country and has been for decades. So, but for hydrogen fueling, that's somewhat newer, but it's become widespread. With the fuel cell forklift installations around the country, there's between 40,000 and 50,000 hydrogen fuelings a month, given all the forklifts and that they're running continuously all day. And they've been, we figure about a million so far, totally safe. And these distribution centers, some of them which are a long highways, could potentially be sites for passenger car fueling and fuel cell electric vehicles. In Europe, there is a serious policy commitment to using hydrogen, not only for fueling infrastructure, but to cope with large amounts of intermittent wind and solar. Private investment is coming back to the sector, over $500 million in private investment made in fuel cell companies between 2009 and 2011. And we dominate the intellectual marketplace too, with more than 1,000 patents in the past 10 years, which nearly three times the amount of patents compared to solar, not to say anything wrong with solar, just as a point of comparison. The growth of other energy technologies and sources provides tremendous opportunities for fuel cells and hydrogen energy. Our technologies can help integrate intermittent power sources in the grid, and provide a valuable destination for curtailed wind and solar in the electrolysis of water for hydrogen fuel. The Shell Gas Revolution will improve the economics of stationary fuel cells for distributed generation, and for hydrogen infrastructure for fuel cell electric vehicles. But low natural gas prices aren't going to be enough. Distributed generation and alternative fueling for range of technologies, our childhood fueling infrastructure for range of technologies faces significant regulatory barriers. Disruptive technology always does. The United States may be the technical and manufacturing leader in fuel cells and hydrogen energy systems, but it's Japan, Germany, South Korea, China, and much of Europe that is taking policy leadership to bring this technology to market. We need to use the imagination and energy in this building to change that. The good news is that this is an effort that's being taken up, I think, on a wider and wider basis. The Department of Energy Fuel Cell Programs are among the best in the agency. They've invested more than 3.5 billion in fuel cell and related research, which has spawned, helps spawn more than 30 commercial companies. Department of Defense has continued its work on fuel cells and hydrogen, deploying fuel cell systems for the past 20 years. Backup power, looking into fuel cells both for portable generation and even for fuel cell unmanned aerial vehicles. And state support has been crucial. California's self-generation incentive program has been an important policy in opening the market for distributed generation fuel cells. And obviously their deployment of hydrogen fueling stations. Connecticut, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, Delaware, and Hawaii are also making commitments to the technology. There will be substantial bumps in the road to commercial success. We'll face entrenched competition. But we're in a global race to bring this technology to full commercialization. And if we win, we'll reap awards and jobs, exports, and technological advancement for years to come. Our industry has produced wonderful success stories, but we've only just begun, so it's an exciting time. Thank you, look forward to your questions. And I must say, it is an exciting time for these technologies. But for technologies that we were hearing about all day long. And I think that we should feel really good about that. And how important it is to make sure that we really are able to reap the benefit. Because for almost everything, it's still very important that we have the right policies in place that allows all of this to really realize its full potential. So are there any questions? We could take a couple questions before we close out. Go ahead. In the US, the production tax credit has not been a huge factor for fuel cells. The 1603 tax program was helpful in being able to sort of pull forward some of the financing for some of these projects. Right now, it's the support or the partnership that's needed. I think some of our, one of our CEOs said they would trade all the government funding for really strong statements of policy commitment from the White House. I think you've got states moving ahead, and what is lacking is a clear sense of federal direction that this is a technology they're going to be committed to. Fuel cells are going to run up into the regulatory barriers that face distributed generation. And no amount of tax credits will overcome that until we deal with some of those regulatory issues with hydrogen fueling infrastructure. The same thing. There are definitely cost barriers. And some of the existing tax credits really aren't enough to get the companies over the hump to build those stations. But again, in those cases, I think a policy commitment that hydrogen infrastructure is something that is, that the United States wants, that there's a commitment to that market can be as important as just the dollars, and we're busy trying to find ways to accelerate hydrogen infrastructure that don't necessarily cost money because we all know the environment that we're in. Okay. Any other questions? Go ahead. If you talked about stationary resources and power, I know a lot of times fuel cells need to go to the front. I did have a question about the fuel box, and I appreciate you bringing that up. Has the cost of the fuel box continued to go down, especially as an up-to-date fuel project? And if so, how would students be able to be before the cost effect of grid parity against this thing? A harder question to answer, mostly because Bloom is reluctant to share a lot of their cost data. Yeah. We do too. Even for us who do the, yeah, we wish to. Even for us who report on the market trends and the industry as a whole, it is hard to get these numbers out of the company. They are finding customers, no problem. They're packaging the deals with the power purchase agreements. They're locking in 20-year rates for the electricity. They're selling them on regular commercial terms. But how to get the cost down and what the future is, that's a harder question to answer. And when we ask our members, because we're a trade association, so we work with what our members want to work with us and tell us, when we ask them about costs, sometimes their answer is, well, how many are you buying? So there are fuel cell electric buses in service in the Bay Area, and now they're about a million to a piece, 1.2 million a piece. But if there was an order for 10 or 20 or 30 of them, it would be less. And they're functioning as buses in everyday applications. Fuel cell energy, we gave a presentation a couple of days ago where they, I think they're cost of power at about 15 cents a kilowatt hour, but they just had an order for 290 megawatts in South Korea. And South Korea wants to start building them there. So as to asking them what their cost is in five years when those are all in, and I think it will be different. So it really is a question of an industry that's looking for scale opportunities. And one of the reasons we love being at the expo is I think all novel technologies have some of the same pathways and obstacles. And we look at semiconductors. One of the ways that we got semiconductors to be a reasonable cost was that the military put in huge orders for them and bought lots and lots of them. So whether it's from the private sector or the public sector, I think as an industry we're looking for the biggest deals that we can get. Just one, I'll say one more thing, and it ties into, Ryan mentioned his favorite fuel cell installation, and I should mention my favorite fuel cell installation. My favorite fuel cell installation is a tri-generation facility in Orange County which takes wastewater treatment gas from a sewage treatment plant, treats that gas and runs the gas through a stationary fuel cell. Because that fuel is not being combusted, you get combined heat and power plus a stream of hydrogen. So you're getting both stationary power and transportation fuel out of the same dose of energy, not choosing between burning it in a car or burning it in a turbine, which is why we see ourselves as the future for natural gas. Now, how much did that facility cost? Well, it's the first one in the world. It's only one of them, but it's entirely possible to build more. We just have to decide that that's something that we're going to do. And it just goes to show, and that there are many other applications too, but wastewater treatment facilities are actually a resource for biogas in terms of thinking about what you can do with regard to transportation fuel, power generation CHP, which is terribly important in terms of that. So it's once again, nothing should be a waste, but instead a resource that we just use in a better and high value way. So I hope that this has been a good learning experience for everybody. It certainly has been for me. And I want to thank our presenters very, very much. And I want to thank all of you for still being here and hope that you have also gained something from this. And please let us know how we can be of help in the future. Thank you so very much. Thanks.