 So, welcome to this day where we're going to be discussing an equitable, affordable, and resilient nationwide energy system transition. I'm delighted to welcome all of you, but we see here Stanford researchers and students, faculty and researchers that will be engaged in the earnest effort. And a lot of people from the stakeholders and communities that we hope to engage with. It is delightful to see you all here. Thank you so much for your time. We'll get started with the agenda and we'll have some opening remarks by Roland Orn. Professor Orn is the Interim Director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, and also my colleague in the Energy, Science, and Engineering Departments at the Doors School of Sustainability. This will be followed by our Dean, Rune Manjundar, who is also a colleague in Energy, Science, and Engineering Departments. And finally, Kevin Lin, who is the Director for the Grid Modernization, Energy Efficiency, and Renewable Energy Office with the U.S. Department of Energy. And with that, I'll let Roland take on. All right. Thank you, Ness. And I add my greeting to all of you. So this is the second of two days of meetings in which we're looking at ways in which universities, including Stanford, can collaborate with the public sector. Yesterday, we had California Energy Commission. Today we're focusing on Department of Energy. So all of us are here today to, in the spirit of Oscar Wilde, discover the importance of being earnest. And the focus of today is in the purview of the three organizations that you've just heard from, the Precourt Institute for Energy, the Stanford Doors School of Sustainability, and the Department of Energy. So as the Interim Director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, just let me take a moment and tell you what Precourt is and what we do. So the Institute is a cross-school, a cross-university organization, which brings in members of the faculty, students, and research from across all of the seven schools of the university, although it actually sits under the School of Sustainability. And our job is to create a community of scholars to address the issues of energy and provide that community for organizations such as earnest to exist. So we're supporting the foundation of this new organization. So the vision for the Precourt Institute for Energy, I have to read this so I don't get it wrong, sustainable, affordable, secure energy for all. So energy, sustainable, affordable, secure, and all. And if you look at what earnest stands for, that's pretty much that same purview. So with that, again, I greet you on behalf of the Precourt Institute for Energy and I look forward to joining with you to learn about earnest today. Thank you. Good morning. First of all, I want to welcome all my old friends from DOE, Kevin and Eric and many others. It's great to have you on this coast. And I also want to congratulate Inez for your leadership and pulling this whole really important topic together in a project. I know what it takes to create programs like this in DOE. There's a lot of equity from different parts of DOE in this. And the fact that EERE has come out with this in effort that is focused, that is really relevant and the emphasis on equity is clearly this administration's one of the main topics of focus. It's really important. Maybe I could just offer some of my own thoughts on this issue. This is about the energy system in which it is both the electricity and the fuel side. Well, let me say a little bit about the electricity side. Maybe just to frame some of the issues that might be discussed in the future. The electricity grid is considered the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century. This is according to the National Academy of Engineering. Yet we find ourselves in a place that this is going to change dramatically. Number one, there's a huge amount of investment in renewables that are going in. Last year around the world, $1.8 trillion was invested in renewables. And almost 500 gigawatts or 300 something of foreign gigawatts or so around the world. Compared to that, compared to $1.8 trillion, $1 trillion was invested in oil and gas sector. So you can see it's almost double. That's the trend that is going in now. Yet the grid was never designed for renewables. It was designed for turbomachinery. And so we have a challenge in managing the grid with high penetration of renewables. We do have storage now for a few hours. That is affordable. The solutions for long duration storage are really not here yet, except for pumped hydro. And I'm looking at Dan Riker who's really focused on hydro issues. But except for pumped hydro, the other long duration storage is not quite affordable. So in this transition, we've got to manage that. How we put renewables without really breaking down the grid. The other aspect of renewables is that we are likely to have two-way power flows. The grid was never designed for that. And the two-way power flows have to be managed, which means the distribution network and the transmission network have to be considered together. Today, the distribution network in the modeling of the transmission system is considered a node. That's not going to happen in the future when you have disturbances coming from the distribution network into the transmission system. And there are large loads that are going into the distribution system that were not there before. Heat pumps, EVs charging where the power requirement is much higher than a home. And so these are changes that are happening to the grid on the distribution system that could spill over in the transmission system, which are really critical to consider. There are weather extremes that are going on. And that's only going to get aggravated. And there are some studies going on out here where they've looked at, in the past, the statistics of what are called SADIs and SAFIs. And these are reliability challenges in the grid where the grid goes down. And you look at what the statistics are and you find that they are correlated with not one event, but two compounding events that are happening at the same time. And so we need some modeling to be able to tell whether, you know, what's going to happen and what are the risks involved in this. And when there are weather extremes, you can bet that the underserved communities, the low income communities, will be affected more by this than the other higher income. And we saw that happen in Texas and how the load shedding was, the decisions were made about the load shedding. So this is real. We're living in this world and if you think California is bad, just go to Asia and you'll find out that climate change is here and now. It's in their face. So these are issues that really are new issues that are coming up that need to be addressed. So we have in California wildfires, the policy of how you do undergrounding to address the risk of wildfire is not equitable. In terms of the energy, we all want to go towards heat pumps. So who gets to then manage the gas system that takes energy to your homes for heating? Will it be the low income families who cannot afford the heat pumps today to manage that? Or are there other policies that need to be created so that they don't have the burden of maintaining a dying natural gas system because of the fact that everyone's moving and especially the higher income people are moving to heat pumps? So these are policy issues. These are ethical issues involved out here. And there's a compact that we have created in society on giving a utility the monopoly, but they're regulated monopoly. That's a compact we have created. And that compact needs to be looked at from the equity point of view. And I hope we get into these discussions in the future. As I said a little bit about the modeling and the transmission distribution, we don't have valuation for reliability. We don't have resilient standards between the distribution and the transmission system. And so we really don't know how to address this. And I hope Ernest really addresses this in a way that FERC and NERC and all the other agencies that look at this interstate system work with the states to come up with these and implement these standards. Again, let me just say that this is a such an important topic in this transition that it is not just here in California. We had a terrific day yesterday talking about some of the challenges and opportunities in California, but this is bigger than that. And I really congratulate, again, Ernest, to bring together a group of people from around this country to really address this issue. Thank you very much, Ernest. So good morning, everybody. My name is Kevin Lin from Department of Energy. And I'm here with my partner in crime, Eric Miller, from the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology Office, where the program manager is for this particular project. I personally am really excited to be back here at Stanford. It's probably been trying to think the last time I was here is probably eight years ago and to see some familiar faces like Dr. Majumdar. And then Lee is here, who is Director of Sunshots. And a whole range of different folks are here. I wanted to focus my comments. I'm really excited about this program. This is going to be a very exciting program. I wanted to focus sort of my comments in three broad areas. You know, a lot of times when people think about the Department of Energy, you think of sort of this big national program, and it sort of has this national perspective. One of the things that I really like about where this administration has gone is not only we're still focused nationally, but we're also focused from the bottom up. And so there's a lot of community programs. There's state community energy program. There's a program I run called the Clean Energy to Communities Program. There's also, you know, there's programs from the Office of Electricity. Really trying to focus not just from the top down, but from the bottom up. And I think Ernest is going to really help be an important puzzle piece to try to bring, to work with communities to help them meet their clean energy goals. You know, one of my very first, most of what the work that I do is something called grid modernization. I heard cats try to pull people together from a variety of different programs and try to make solar work with the electric vehicles program, work with the hydrogen fuel cell technology office. But a big thing that I do also, the very first program I worked on was something called Solar America Cities. And that was a community program that really focused on from the bottom up, working with cities like San Diego, like San Francisco, trying to help them develop their goals for their community around solar. And I was just telling Dr. Majumdar, you know, one of the very first principal investigators that we had in Solar America Cities when I first got started was Commissioner McAllister from now the commissioner of the CEC. And I got to see him yesterday. I was really excited to see him. But I think that's a really, I'm really excited that this community, you know, that this administration has focused on the communities working from the bottom up and that this program is focusing on that. The second thing I want to focus on is, you know, we like to talk a lot about innovation. Innovation is a really important word. And we think about it a lot of times, at least I think about it as in terms of basic science. But one of the things that I think is really important and I heard Dr. Benson talk about it yesterday, was about systems. How do you pull together different programs together? And I heard it in terms of AI, too. How do you think about pulling together different, you know, electric vehicle program with the solar program with all these different programs working together, information, so we can bring together something innovative that doesn't focus on any particular individual technology? And earnest is exactly one of those types of programs. It's really trying to pull together multiple pieces together and try to build something for communities. And, you know, the truth is, even though at Department of Energy we build around individual technologies a lot of times, communities don't care about that. They really think about how all these different energy pieces come together to help them meet their clean energy goals. And so I'm really proud that Eric and I have really worked to develop a program that really focuses on that. And third, I wanted to talk a little bit about one of the things that I think is important about what I think of Eric and my role is here. You know, earnest is gonna be, it's a great program for communities and it's one of a lot of programs that we have at the Department of Energy right now. And part of what I think our job is to do and work with Inez is to really focus on how do all these pieces, puzzle pieces I like to think about them, fit together for communities. You know, this is a really important program and Inez is gonna talk about what the elements of this program are, but how do they fit together with either our Clean Energy Communities Program or with SCEP, Energy Futures Grants Program, demonstration programs with some of the GRIP programs in the Grid Development Office. There's all these different puzzle pieces out there that are gonna help communities meet their clean energy goals. This is an important piece of that that sort of builds from the foundation thinking about where do you even start from? What are the metrics? What are the tools to build that vision? But then we have to think about deployment and implementation and how do these all pieces fit together? And I think Eric and I are gonna have to think about how we pull all those pieces together to make, you know, communities be successful in meeting their clean energy goals. So thank you for the opportunity to speak this morning and as I'll turn it over to you. Thank you so much, Kevin, Rune and Roland for this introduction. We'll now get started on a description of what is earnest and why are we all here today? There is a long and arduous road ahead in the energy transition. A lot of work is done and it's really one of those examples where we'll need to bring everyone together to enable a successful transition. In light of that, we put together this effort on equitable, affordable, resilient, nationwide energy system transition. And by the end of this presentation, everyone will remember earnest, the logo and what it stands for. So we are a consortium of institutions of higher education across the United States, Canada and Mexico, supported by the US National Laboratories Ecosystem, the Electric Power Research Institute and NRECA. This was a really great effort in bringing all of these constituencies together with the goal of achieving several different things that I'll walk through today. Ultimately, this is about people and bringing the researchers together. These team brings expertise, ranging from energy justice, climate resilience, hazard management, regulatory policy and economics, energy system modeling, electric power system modeling. And the constitution of the team was such that we really looked around and tried to assess where the expertise was currently and we're delighted to have a lot of researchers that have contributed to national academy reports to the US National Climate Assessment and to some of the key research and publications that have recently emerged associated with resilience, a transition of the electricity system, affordability and environmental justice. I mentioned ultimately this is about people. It really takes a team to put together this proposal. The work still lies ahead, we're just getting started. In this figure I'm showing the lead PIs at each of the institutions and groups that will be participating in earnest. There are way more people than this that are gonna be engaged in this effort over the next few years at each of those institutions built as co-PIs, researchers and most importantly, graduate students that are gonna help support this entire endeavor. I'd like to provide a shout out to the team at Stanford University who is really helping me also getting us started on a productive research agenda. And though they are not in the slides, I'll mention that this work wouldn't be possible without the help of Liang Min. Ram Rajagopal and Arun Manjundar who have been instrumental in getting a research started on how to define reliability and resilience. Adam Brandt who is looking into the natural gas and electricity interactions. Michael Ward and Michael Massandria focusing on legal issues in the adoption of energy technologies. Noah Defonbach who is looking into climate extremes. Megan Malter who is focusing on water and energy intersection and bringing in also a great expertise on large research efforts. Sibyl Diver working with communities on the ground and providing the best social sciences approaches and as well as Sally Benson bringing the expertise on energy policy and the energy technologies. Now, Ernest and our team is a response to a US energy system landscape that is rapidly changing. There are several reasons for this change, several drivers that are motivating the work that we'll be pursuing. First and foremost, the need to decarbonize overall the US economy. And this is enhanced by the goals from President Biden to achieve 100% clean electricity by 2035 and overall zero carbon economy by 2050. This is a daunting task, but we may be on the path to get there. The second one relates to concerns about economic conditions and employment. And this once again can be tested by the recent Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act from 2021 as well as the Inflation Reduction Act recently passed in 2022. Layer on that, the fact that there is a neagerness from society and the desire to reduce social inequities as shown by the efforts from the government such as EJ40 and the Associated White House Interim Implementation Guidance for such plans. And finally, even if we deploy all the best strategies for climate mitigation across the energy sector and other sectors of the economy, we'll be faced with some of the implications from climate change and associated risks from extreme weather events. And those are just one subset of the risks that the energy system and the grid faces, others being cybersecurity and so on. With all of this in mind, we're providing this response by thinking about the aspects that this transition requires. Achieving a sustainable grid of the future will require to plan for resilience as the grid starts to change and operate in novel ways. It will require us to rethink and accelerate the processes for investment, planning and permitting of large infrastructure. It will require us to reform public and private incentives for innovation. And finally, we're doing this in the context of linkages with neighboring countries, Canada and Mexico. So we'll need to start thinking about cross-border dependencies and solutions across the North American region. So the goals that we have established for this consortium are to enable and support decision tools, information and research that allows us to meet the carbonization goals, that allow us to incorporate environmental justice, distributional considerations and public preferences as we think about the deployment of this new and low carbon infrastructure. To understand the status of resilience, broadly speaking, not only reliability but other facets of resilience associated with the use and production of electricity and associated services. And finally, we'll need to do so in an iterative process. The work will be started. It will need to be refined along the way as we learn across these multiple dimensions. The logo for earnest is reflecting what you're seeing in the slide. Some of the envisioned outcomes at the end of this project are that we hope to equip an interdisciplinary workforce that is ready to tackle these great challenges. It requires a broad understanding of engineering, of social sciences and of the policy landscape to be ready to enable those changes. We hope to provide open source tools that will inform decision-making at all levels, decision-making for regulators, for the industry and for community-based processes where those decisions will need to also emerge. And finally, and very importantly, to produce research that actually can inform the energy systems transition. Let me talk through each of those objectives and I'll start with the first one on supporting the workforce. We will have three specific mechanisms to allow us to achieve this goal. We'll organize summer internships and those will have the feature of being designed so that the summer interns are hosted by NGOs, Think Tank, the National Laboratory Ecosystem, as well as the University Ecosystem and Industries. This will provide them with a hands-on experience of working on the ground as those decisions are enabled. The second goal will be to equip PhDs and master students with a type of technical, social science and policy knowledge and know-how that will enable them to pursue research on all these fronts. And finally, we want to have this knowledge base being accessible. So we'll work on having materials and information and guidance online through learning tools for communities and students. Now let me tell you a little bit about the other goals. And the first one would be thinking about in order to understand how to get there, we do need to understand where we are. So a first goal from Ernest will be to understand where do we stand in terms of metrics for emissions of greenhouse gases, emissions of air pollutants, resilience and reliability, economics, and map all of those issues in open source tools. Here I'm providing just an example of recent work that was done by Jacques Chalander and Sally Benson where they are illustrating in almost real time the carbon intensity of consumption at each of the different US balancing areas. And if you go to the website, you can actually see that changing hour to hour. Our team has indeed been at the forefront of producing those sorts of tools, builds for emissions accounting and for health damages from air pollution. Once we've established where we are today, we want to understand how can we get there in terms of a sustainable grid of the future that has the features of being affordable, equitable and reliable. So we'll be planning on developing open source data products, tools and models for these grid decisions. Over here illustrating with a model that you can hear more about in the technical sessions in the afternoon, we're trying to understand the implications of adding offshore wind in the coast of California for the rest of the grid. Finally, we do want to enable and learn from context specific cases and hopefully generalize the solutions that we find and see where those are applicable. To achieve that, we have established several pilot projects across the multiple institutions that we have as part of our consortium and across different types of themes. Each of those pilot projects that you see on the map was designed to engage stakeholders and communities from the beginning as we think about engineering based solutions. They cover four different themes. The first theme is focusing on strategies for decarbonization and resilience while ensuring EJ and distributional effects at broad regional or scale level cases. And we have three case studies or pilots that will tackle one focusing on California decarbonization, another on Texas decarbonization, and then we have one for ISO New England and one for Iowa. A second theme is radically different in terms of scale and equally important, which is to provide grid solutions for small or isolated grids. And then there we have several different projects across our teams focusing on Spokane region, Alaska and Canada, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Inuvik region in Canada. Cities are a large part of the carbon footprint currently. So a third theme focuses on solutions for cities, in particular for electrification of end users and transitions from natural gas to electricity while being cognizant of the implications of such transitions for low income, taking into account distributional effects as we think so. And there we have four different case studies, New York City, Boston and Arbor and Tennessee. And finally, because US solution cannot work in isolation and do need coordination with the neighboring regions, team four is looking for solutions related to both interconnection and provision of new services with Mexico and with Canada. So with that and mapping to the course of earnest, we have this really exciting agenda coming up. Because the stakeholder component and learning and understanding from the communities that are on the ground faced with these decisions, each such an important aspect, the first plenary session is gonna focus on how can we provide co-creation of knowledge in this space? We traditionally underrepresented communities. Because this earnest effort will work between the context of federal laws and ecosystems and policies, we then focus on how university research and the national lab ecosystem can help support the federal landscape to achieve decarbonization, resilience and equitable solutions. We then move on to the lunch session where we think about solutions with our neighbors, with Canada and with Mexico. And finally, you'll hear from three technical sessions. These sessions map the pilots that I was illustrating in the map a couple of slides ago. And so they will range from solutions at the state level all the way to microgrids for remote regions. And finally, we'll have a round table discussion on what are the types of fundamental contributions that can be provided by earnest in terms of open source tools across our ecosystem of researchers. Have some closing remarks and then we'll end with a networking reception and post a session where we'll have also wine and cheese. And with that, we'll be ready to get our work started. I look very much, hearing from all of you, we'll welcome your comments. And with this said, I will welcome Holmes Hummel, who is gonna organize the next panel. Thank you everyone.