 We are rounding the far turn, and this is in fact session seven, and if you're in here to figure out how to fix your iPhones, that session's down the hall a little. But welcome to session seven of the ESI Expo and our policy session, Renewable Energy Expo. And in this last section, we're going to be talking about renewable energy trends and prospects. And so if you've sat here for the entire day, first of all, bless you. You have incredible amount of intestinal fortitude and rear end fortitude. But more importantly, you've learned how many moving parts there are to this goal that we're moving towards. And so as part of that, we have to take a look at what trends are coming up. And we have a, how shall I say this, a very full panel that's going to give us as much information as we permit in 10 minutes, and then we'll try and have 10 minutes each, and then have a question asked at the end if we have time. That's all right with you. Our first speaker is Brie Rahm. She's Vice President of Federal Affairs of the American Wind Energy Association, otherwise known as AWIA. So since we don't have PowerPoint, I'm going to go through the AWIA 2018 market report, and there are some really great graphs in here that we would use as PowerPoint slides. So I'm just going to go through those. So if you have them, I believe my colleagues, Taylor and Andrew, I've already handed them out. I'll just walk you through them. So first off, a little bit about the American Wind Energy Association. We represent the entire wind industry value chain. We have 1,000 members, and that includes developers of wind projects, manufacturers, and utilities, and everything in between. Currently we have over 97,000 megawatts of wind power across the United States, which include over 56,000 turbines, actual wind turbines. That's enough capacity to power about 30 million homes. Wind has really grown significantly since 2000 and has more than tripled since 2008. Wind is now the number one source of renewable energy capacity. We're surpassing hydropower in 2016, and we currently employ about 1,014,000 Americans in the industry at wind farms and at manufacturing facilities. So if you go to your green map, which is this one right here, in total 41 states have utility scale wind. At the state level, six states generate over 20% of their electricity from wind in 2018. Kansas ranked first with 36%, followed by Iowa, 34%, then Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Maine. This is a significant increase compared to 10 years ago, when Iowa was the only state to produce over 5% of its electricity from wind. Texas, Oklahoma, and Iowa lead in total generation. Texas leads the nation with nearly 25,000 megawatts of installed capacity. That's 25% of everything that's currently in the ground. Iowa solidified its second place position and grew to nearly 9,000 megawatts of wind capacity, but Oklahoma remains at third with about 8,000 megawatts of capacity. Historically, there's been no project development in the southeast, and that's really due to lesser wind resource. But as the turbines start to get bigger, the higher you go, the better the wind energy resource, and we're starting to see more development in the south, such as in North Carolina, where about two years ago it brought on its first large-scale wind farm. If you go to the blue map with the red dots, this is my favorite map. It's one in the middle. That highlights the wind energy demand for domestic manufacturing. We have over 500 wind-related manufacturers in the United States. These companies make a variety of the 8,000 different components that go into a wind turbine. 19 of the 500 manufacturing facilities make the major components, such as the blades, the towers, the nacelles, etc. Although the southeast does not have many wind farms, it's a huge manufacturing hub with over 100 manufacturers based in the southeast. Ohio is the leading state for manufacturing with 61 plants out of the 500, followed by Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If you go to the red, white, and blue map right here, one thing that some might not realize is that wind energy or renewables for that matter is not a partisan issue in terms of where the wind is located in the country. With almost 80% of the wind power capacity installed since 2016, it was built in states that voted for President Trump. So there is a wind project or manufacturing facility in 78% of Republican districts, compared to 62% of Democratic-held districts. Texas's 19th congressional district, led by Representative Jody Arrington, has the most consolidated capacity at over 8 gigawatts of wind. So to put that into perspective, Congressman Arrington has more wind in his district than all of Oklahoma. Finally, the last map I'll go over is this one in the corner. It's the Offshore Wind Energy Map, and one of the reasons why I love this map is because it didn't exist just a couple years ago. Offshore wind, we have 30 megawatts. That's only five turbines of what we refer to as steel in the water, but we're very excited about those five turbines. We're also very excited about the 25,000 megawatts of offshore wind we have in the pipeline. And this is a huge growing industry, and we're really excited about it. So a little bit about prospects and where we'd like to see wind go. One, we would like to see, because we're on Capitol Hill right now, some long-term stable policy. And what that looks like is one, transmission development. This is our number one issue. Transmission development is essential to deploying more wind energy. It's extremely difficult to site transmission projects. And a couple of things that we would like to see Congress do is, one, direct FERC to direct the RTOs to actually synchronize their planning process. We think that will open up some transmission development. And ideally, we would love FERC to have some kind of at least limited backstop authority in order to site these much needed transmission projects. In the tax space, the wind energy industry supports tax policy parity. In absence of any kind of broad federal policy, like any kind of carbon policy, the U.S. tax code has really been the de facto source of energy policy. But the numerous energy-related incentives in the tax code have made the energy tax landscape really unnecessarily complex. So for example, you have a variety of tax credits out there at varying levels that end at varying times. And that really isn't the level playing field that we need as renewables. Parity or a step in the right direction can be accomplished through several means, including a tech-neutral carbon-based tax credit, like the one that's in the Senate with Senator Wyden. And also having, in the step in the right direction, we think a tax credit where wind and storage can be included as part of the current Section 48 investment tax credit that is also available for solar energy. We would also consider extending the current tax credit as proposed in the Taxpayer Certainty and Disaster Tax Release Act that just came out of the House Ways and Means Committee. Some other tax policies that we're keenly interested in and are pushing. One is the Production Tax Credit Investment Tax Credit Transferability. We desperately need that policy in place this year and also the extension of the ITC for offshore wind. And that is really because the offshore wind industry is really just getting established here as a domestic industry. So with that, I'll stop our remarks, turn it over to my colleagues and answer questions later. And I like the concept that you guys are excited. I mean, one of the things you want to bring to this whole exercise in exchanging information is to share that excitement about what various industry groups, what sectors are doing to create that excitement within their sectors. Our next speaker is Carrie Annand. She's Executive Director of the Biomass Power Association. Thank you, Jared. So yeah, my name is Carrie Annand. I'm with the Biomass Power Association. So at first I thought I'd lead off with just talking about what exactly is biomass. I think a lot of times when we hear about renewables, I think in a lot of people's minds that's wind and solar. And the field of renewables is actually much broader than that. My members, which have about 80 power facilities across the country, use organic fuels like forest residues, tops and limbs from forestry operations where you have the logs, the merchantable timber going towards sawmills and you have pulp appropriate fiber going to paper mills. And my members use the leftovers from that process. They're known as tops and limbs and thinnings from forest. They use nut shells, oat hulls, all kinds of orchard pruning. So agricultural waste that otherwise might be open-burned, where the carbon just goes into the atmosphere rather than actually putting it to use and getting value out of it. So really biomass is really as much about putting power onto the grid as it is about waste management and putting agricultural and organic waste to use. It's a great supplement when you're pairing it up with solar or wind. It's a base load, so it's 24-7, which makes it a really good candidate for teaming up with other sources of electricity that may not be 24-7. It also, as I said, it's about dealing with waste and putting waste to use and fusing money into local economies, jobs, and, like I said, putting the waste to use. It also is critical for forest management. One of our partners is the U.S. Forest Service, and I see Julie Tucker there, so thanks for coming. When you look at places like California and a lot of states out west, the forest there, and we're seeing a lot more forest fires, particularly due to climate change and duta conditions that lend themselves to massive fires. When you actually can clear out the forest and put the waste to use, you can have a better result. You can have less dramatic forest fires, and you can have forest fires that don't threaten communities as much as they do now, maybe. Also, I'd like to point out on forest fires, the state of California has actually required utilities in the state to purchase power from biomass power facilities, specifically so they can continue to take on the so-called hazardous fuels that are cleared out of forests. That brings me to California being kind of the exception and not the rule, which is pretty surprising when you think about biomass. In other areas of the country, biomass power plants are shutting down, unfortunately, and a lot of that has to do with policy. As Brie was saying, policy can have a huge impact on the growth of an industry and on the stability of an industry. Right now, the biomass industry as well as some of the other renewables are expired under the tax program, so we're not eligible to receive tax incentives that some of the other renewables currently do have. We'd like to see those tax credits, the PTC and the ITC, extended to biomass. I'm sure Dennis will talk about that too for hydropower. That's going to be really important. I think in the second half of the year, we're probably going to be talking about tax extenders quite a bit. I would agree with what Brie was saying about parity and accessibility for all renewables. We all use tax credits in different ways, so it's important to think about that when applying policy and tax incentives to different renewable industries. Another policy that we're hoping has a big impact on biomass power is the renewable fuel standard. The RFS, which I'm sure most of you associate with ethanol and with pumping ethanol into your gas tanks, it does actually include electricity. When you're powering an EV with electricity that comes from biomass, it comes from waste to energy, or it comes from biogas, you should be able to qualify for the renewable fuel standard. Right now, the EPA hasn't yet included electricity in the RFS, which has now been close to 12 years since the RFS was implemented, and we've been left out of the program. This is really important when you start to think about reducing carbon from transportation sources. The EPA has recognized that using biomass, using renewable fuels to power an EV is 96% less carbon emitting than using gasoline in a traditional internal combustion engine. That's our biggest policy objective, is to get electricity and biomass included in the RFS, but we're looking at tax too, and appreciate everyone for coming out today. I will turn it back over to Jared and look forward to questions. Thank you, Carrie. For those of you who have been here most of the day, I think you'd agree one of the themes you continue to hear from almost every industry we've talked to is consistency in federal policy. The need for us to realize where we're trying to go is some reliability in policy. So our next speaker, Kathleen Vodovich. Did I get that close? Pretty close. Who's the lead retail marketing specialist with Clean Choice Energy. Hello, everyone. I am Kathleen Votovich. I am the lead sales specialist for Clean Choice Energy. We are located in New York, but we have an office here in Georgetown, which is exciting. We operate in seven states, including DC and Maryland, and I'm really excited to be here today, so thank you for having me. What I like most about this job is the fact that every single person who pays a utility bill actually has the option to choose clean energy over fossil fuels that are polluting our planet. It's really easy to sign up. We just need, if you pay a PEPCO bill, we operate through your PEPCO bill. We keep paying the PEPCO bill, and a lot of people don't know that they have the option, and that's really our biggest barrier. I love this job, and it's something that each one of us can do individually. I'm sure a lot of us feel kind of hopeless right now. It can be a struggle today. A lot of federal regulations are being rolled back that are protecting our environment, and having companies out there that are trying to support the environment is super important for us. So I'm just going to give you guys a couple of fast facts about what Clean Choice Energy has been able to do in the past couple of years. We were founded in 2012. So far we have been able to take out 4.3 billion pounds of carbon out of the atmosphere. That's an equivalent of taking 2.1 billion pounds of coal from being burned and sending that pollution into our atmosphere. It's also akin to preserving per household, per year, 8.1 acres of land. So this is really important. And again, this is something that we can all do. For folks in the room who live in Virginia, another thing that I want to let you know is that unfortunately because Virginia has a monopoly, Dominion operates solely in Virginia, we can't operate there. So one thing that we need to do is make sure that state policies allow competitors to come in so that we can keep this market open and make sure that Clean Energy companies compete for that market share. We've been growing super rapidly. I started working for this company in October and since I started as a sole retail specialist in the field. I'm now managing a team of five or six people. So the industry is growing rapidly and everybody up on this panel has been saying the same thing. This is where the future is. Whether you're in biomass, you're in wind solar. The future is in Clean Energy and we all need to get on board. Again, I just want to encourage you guys, if you want to sign up with me today, this is something we can all do right now today and start taking carbon out of our atmosphere. And the importance of that is we're sending that market signal. So we're making sure that our governments and our companies know that we want to invest our dollars in Clean Energy. And the more people that I can sign up individually, we're showing those wind and solar farms that people are interested in buying this energy. The more people that invest, the faster the energy and the we can clean up our energy grid. We can all do our own part and that's all I've got to say today. So thank you for coming out and make sure that, you know, we're all doing what we can. Thank you. Kathleen, I got it. I was fairly close. Yeah, it's very close. It's a tough one, the whole opposite. The next speaker is going to represent the National Hydro Power Association, Dennis Cackert. And I just wanted to say that I've been in this space for a long time and one of the areas that I always needed to learn more about was hydropower because I think it's one of the, I hate to say this, but it's not about stepchildren or it's just not talked about enough. But I have learned about pump storage. So that's, to me, that's a big deal. So Dennis, why don't you tell us a little bit more about it? Sure. All right. Thank you, Jared. My name is Dennis and I'm with the National Hydro Power Association. And just out of curiosity by a show of hands, how many people in here have actually seen a hydropower project in person? All right. That's higher than I expected. You're with the energy folks. That's true. How many of you live in Virginia by any chance? And keep your hands up if you've been on a lake in Virginia. So those are probably on a lake that is part of a hydropower development. It's almost all lakes in Virginia or a river that's been converted into a hydropower project. And then last question, I promise, how many people in here have heard of a small northeastern Asian country called North Korea? Just about everybody. So what most people don't know about North Korea, it has some energy issues going on, but it's actually a hydro-based electric system. Although based on the satellite images we get of their electricity production, my guess is their reservoirs and dams are not in the best shape these days. The U.S., however, has a robust hydropower system. It's been around for over 150 years. Some were built in the 1800s, some were built as recently as last year, and they range in size, shape, and more recently, we've been developing ocean energy technologies, trying to turn wave energy or wave power into electricity. So just a quick overview of the fleet, hydropower fleet in the U.S. The federal government owns 10% of all hydropower projects in the U.S., but those 10% of projects make up 50% of hydropower electrical capacity. So as you can imagine, they're the bigger dams. A lot of the larger ones built in the original New Deal in the 1930s that helped provide thousands of jobs to folks out west, helped settle the west, and eventually helped provide electricity to the U.S. to help in the Pacific war efforts. The other 90% of dams and 50% of hydropower capacity are non-federally owned, and I guess I lied earlier, I got one more question. Who knows who regulates non-federal dams in the U.S.? Who wants to take a stab at it? It's kind of a trick question, because the answer is the opposite. You could have named any agency here in D.C. and the odds are that they probably regulate hydropower. The lead agency is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERC, who we're all associated with, but we also are regulated by the Fish and Wildlife Service as part of the Department of Interior, the National Marine Fisheries Service as part of NOAA, which is part of the Department of Commerce, the Environmental Protection Agency, the USDA, National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs. You name it, the industry's been around forever. We're probably regulated by them. So this is without a doubt the industry's number one focus over the past few decades has been how do we streamline this regulatory process? There's just a web of agencies here in D.C. that for all good reasons have regulatory authority over hydropower projects, but navigating that system is challenging. To put it in perspective, to build a natural gas pipeline in the United States takes about two years to get the permit to build a hydropower project in the U.S. takes about 10. So we're here today to try and be exciting and uplifting. So we'll speak about kind of the possible hydropower revolution that's just around the corner for us. And the first part of that is development at existing non-powered dams. And last Congress, a bipartisan bill was passed that would streamline the regulatory process for building, for adding generation to an existing dam. So right now only 3% of dams in the U.S. currently generate electricity. A lot of them are used for irrigation or agriculture or are an Army Corps lock and dam. Or some are just old, like New England industrial sites that no longer produce electricity, but the physical barrier is there. And so a lot of the hydropower industry today is focused on how can we craft our turbines and our construction efforts to turn these existing non-powered dams into power generating facilities that might not be able to power an entire state or entire city but could provide the local town that they're in with 24-7 around the clock, carbon free electricity. So the other exciting prospect on the horizon for hydropower is just our role in the renewable energy future. Talking to all of our members, they're thrilled at the development of wind and solar and biomass and geothermal because hydropower has a role to play in that all-encompassing energy policy in that hydropower is an incredibly flexible resource. And when our operators have the ability to ramp up and down on a second-to-second basis. And so if the sun's out and the grid's being powered by solar, you can close your gates, build up that reservoir behind the dam and as the sun goes down open them a little bit at night time when there's no solar, you run hydro until the sun comes back up. So just a closing thought on hydropower and renewable energy in general. If we're going to achieve our aggressive emissions reductions goals which are mostly at the state level now but hopefully eventually at the federal level as well, all of these renewable energy resources here today have a critical role to play and our legislative and regulatory policy in D.C. needs to be designed to maximize output from every source of renewable energy. So with that, I'll turn it back over to Jared and looking forward to your questions afterwards. Our next speaker, Alex Minati. Minati is U.S. Federal Affairs Manager for Neste. Neste. I knew it wasn't Neste. Neste. Neste. All yours. Thank you, Jared. Good afternoon. My name is Alex Minati. I'm the Federal Affairs Manager at Neste. That's Neste, not Nestle. A lot of people get it confused. Just to show a hand since we're doing that today, is anybody previous to today talking to me heard of Neste? Europe doesn't count. So we have a few. But that's why I'm here today. I'd like to tell you a little bit about Neste and our renewable diesel business. But I'd like to focus on two emerging areas where Neste is very excited to provide climate solutions. Renewable jet fuel, also known as sustainable aviation fuel, and chemical recycling of waste plastic as a raw material for fuels, chemicals, and new plastics. These are two areas in need of policy intervention. Just a little bit of background on Neste. Neste started as a finished oil company after World War II. 15 years ago, Neste pivoted to renewable diesel. It's now the world's largest producer of renewable diesel. We have current production of 1 billion gallons and plan to expand over 1.5 billion gallons by 2022. To give you a little perspective, in the last panel they talked about the total biomass-based diesel market of 2.6 billion gallons. So we have worldwide production of about almost half of that. In 2018, our products helped to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1.9 million tons. We have a goal of reducing emissions by 20 million tons a year by 2030. Sustainability is deeply embedded in Neste's everyday business. Neste has been voted the third most sustainable company in the world in 2019 by the Global 100 and the most sustainable energy company. So a little bit of background on renewable diesel. Those that were here previously probably heard a little bit about it in the prior panel, but we've had some turn over. I'll go over it briefly again. First, renewable diesel is not biodiesel. Renewable diesel is a synthetic hydrocarbon. It is essentially diesel. When you look at it under a microscope it is the same carbon chain lengths that go into diesel and it can be fully dropped into our existing vehicles infrastructure up to 100%. The only difference with renewable diesel is that it's made from renewable biomass which was defined earlier. The renewable biomass that Neste uses is 83% waste in residues last year. We primarily used cooking oil and animal fats, but there are lots of ways to make renewable diesel. We use hydro-treating which is a traditional refinery technique that will work on any oily feedstock. So we could use soybean oil. We could use any crop-based oily feedstock. There's other technologies that will gasify wood waste, for example, turn it also into synthetic hydrocarbons. We're exploring new feedstocks including lignocellulosic, algae, waste plastic and cover crops. We're a significant contributor to compliance under the RFS and the California LCFS and just to reiterate what was said in the last panel there's going to be a continuing need for place for biofuels and climate policy for transportation. Particularly renewable diesel and heavy-duty applications, long-haul trucking, things like that with longer life spans on the equipment. Things that are not as easily electrified but there's going to be a continuing need for biofuels in all current transportation applications given the long fleet turnover timeframes and we're not going to be electrifying overnight. But speaking of electrification and things that are not easily electrified, I'd like to talk about renewable jet fuel. Renewable jet fuel is very similar to renewable diesel. Actually we use the same process. We just do an extra distillation step to make renewable jet fuel. It's also a synthetic hydrocarbon can be blended up to 50% with fossil jet fuel today. The only reason we can't go higher than 50% is actually that the manufacturers like the dirty stuff that's in fossil fuel the aromatics that were mentioned earlier because that actually creates some seal swell in the fuel system. But ultimately one day we might get to 100% and that would be a great problem to have but right now we're going to 50%. Next day renewable jet fuel as well as renewable diesel I didn't mention earlier up to 80% life cycle greenhouse gas reductions also significant benefits on the conventional pollutant side. Up to 80% reduction in particulate matter zero sulfur reductions in NOx and unburned hydrocarbons as well. So we're really excited about renewable jet fuel at Neste. We're in the process of commercializing it. We're currently selling it in Europe and we'll be entering the US market this year. We've partnered with major airlines such as American, Alaska and Lufthansa on early agreements but hopefully we'll have some news to announce very soon on actual sales for this year. We're also working with airports, DFW and SFO. So why renewable jet fuel? Well, aviation accounts for 2% to 3% of total GHG emissions and 10% of transportation GHG emissions. It's growing 5% a year and will double in 15 to 20 years. By 2050 with other sectors declining their emissions aviation could be a much more significant source of global GHG emissions. Today, even today if aviation were a country it would be the 7th largest emitter in the world. And aviation is going to be reliant upon liquid transportation fuels for the foreseeable future I would say the medium to the long term. You hear press reports periodically about electric airplanes that's quite a ways off and when and if it does come to fruition it'll be really short haul regional low payload low passengers. So you're not going to be flying across the ocean or across the country or even to more than a few hundred miles on anything other than jet fuel and we hope it will be renewable jet fuel. So getting to policy renewable unfortunately our current policies are focused on ground transportation fuels, biofuels and that was not meant to be discriminatory, it's just that 10 years ago when we were talking about renewable fuels and the Energy Independence and Security Act in 2007 renewable jet fuel was just a glimmer in the eye nobody was really thinking about it and no one was thinking about how to incentivize it. So the current programs renewable jet fuel is eligible under the RFS and we work very hard to get it under the LCFS starting the beginning of this year but there are still less credit available for renewable jet fuel than for example renewable diesel. There's also structural disincentives to renewable jet fuel versus for example us making renewable diesel. You get a higher price per gallon selling it into the diesel pool than you do into the jet fuel just on the basis of the spot price of jet fuel versus diesel. It costs a little bit more to make renewable jet fuel than it costs to make diesel. We have to also have a higher safety requirements of course when you're talking about aviation versus ground transportation fuel. So one of the things that Congress can really look to on policy and I'm very excited to see that their work is beginning on this and that the discussion is starting on how to incentivize renewable jet fuel. I see a staffer in here I don't know if it's public yet so I won't mention it but that has been working on this area and so there is thinking starting to go on on how can we incentivize this industry where aviation has no choice but to use jet fuel and renewable jet fuel if they want to reduce their emissions because aviation is growing faster than the new planes are becoming more efficient. So growing 5% a year fuel efficiency is improving 1% to 2% a year. Without renewable jet fuel aviation emissions will continue to grow unless you go to out of sector areas like offsets. I think there's a lot of things that could be done on the policy front. There's one thing that could be considered that is a multiplier effect under the renewable fuel standard. Currently RJF gets 1.6 RINs and RD Renewable Diesel gets 1.7. To make up for that delta between the two might make sense to do 2.0 RINs. The European RED has done something very similar. They have a credit multiplier for renewable jet fuel currently of 1.2 versus 1.0. This policy is another area to look. We've heard a lot about the blunders tax credit. You could extend out the blunders tax credit for 10 years in recognition of the infancy of this industry specific to renewable jet fuel. You could have a new credit for renewable jet fuel that was specifically focused on this area that needs mitigation. You could have an exemption from the excise tax credit. It's only about 5 cents a gallon for the airlines, but it's 20 cents a gallon for general aviation. That question, do we really want to be taxing fuel that we want here? I think that would be some low hanging fruit incremental approach, but would certainly be beneficial. Of course, there's mandates. Europe is proceeding with mandates. There's a 0.5 percent mandate in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Spain and France are also considering that. Given the acrimony around the RFS, that is a tough prospect in the U.S. We would of course love a mandate, but I think that there's opportunities to focus on win-win solutions on the tax side. Things that the aviation industry can get around can rally around that will be good for producers, good for airlines and provide extra credits for obligated parties that are very fast, for example. So there's lots to be discussed. It's just important to start this conversation. Finally, I just want to briefly talk about waste plastics. We hear a lot about waste plastics in the last 6 months or so. DC just banned plastic straws. We talked a lot about the lack of value for waste plastics in the recycling area. One area that Neste is pursuing that we think could be a solution for the waste plastic problem is environmental recycling. It essentially liquefies the waste plastic and that turns that into new fuels, new chemicals, and the building blocks of new plastics. Neste has a goal of processing more than 1 million tons, 340 million gallons of waste plastic in our conventional refinery by 2030. We're looking forward to solutions in that area. Currently, the alternative fuels tax credit that was mentioned earlier for natural gas, waste plastic, another thing that's not eligible under the RFS. There's a lot of things that could be done to encourage waste plastic to fuels and kill tubers with one stone there to deal with the waste plastic problem and also get some low carbon fuels. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. Again, I come back to the term excited because you're a nascent industry and there are other nascent industries that were described today, biomass and clean diesel, etc. They're now mature and very, very accepted in the marketplace. So everything that we're doing today certainly has a potential impact on our future. Our next speaker, I won't say that this is a mature speaker, but she is, in fact, a substitute for, I mean that in the nicest way. What I mean is that she's a substitute for Erin. I don't know how many of you know Erin, but she couldn't make it today. Selena Cunningham is a vice president and chief of staff of SEA, the Solar Energy Industry Association, and you're going to share some thoughts with us. Thank you. I'm excited to be here today and Erin shares her apologies for not making it. She had another conflict. So SEA is the nation's trade association for solar energy. We represent the full suite of solar industry companies from developers, installers, manufacturers, and we have 1,000 member companies. Right now the solar industry employs 250,000 Americans and brings $17 billion to the U.S. economy. It's continuing to be a critical part of the U.S. energy mix and this is due in part because of public support and policies at both the state and federal level that support solar development. So public support, over 90% of the public approve the more utilities providing more solar energy and this includes two thirds of all Republicans believe that utilities should deploy more solar power and so we're seeing solar deployment increase dramatically. It took us 40 years to get the first 1 million solar rooftop installed. In just three years we added an additional million and so solar can be also a meaningful solution to climate change. Today there's enough solar to offset more than 73 million metric tons of CO2 emissions that's equivalent to taking 15 million vehicles off the road. And so with the right policies in place the future of solar is bright. We believe that over the next five years we can install 75 gigawatts of solar capacity and by 2023 we'll reach 4 million solar installations. And so how we're going to do that is by making sure that we have ambitious goals for the future. Right now we're only at 2.3% of electricity generation. We believe that by 2030 we can get to 20%. And how we're going to do that is a number of different steps. Number one is we think that we should extend the solar investment tax credit. And this is an important piece of legislation that has been the most important federal policy to advance solar deployment. It's created hundreds of thousands of jobs and generated over $140 billion of investment in communities across the country. And we agree that we need the ability in the tax policy to support advancement of renewable energy. This has multiple benefits. One, jobs, the economy, but also from climate change perspective. While we support legislation, be it carbon tax or other comprehensive legislation to address carbon, while we continue to work on that the ITC remains the best choice of opportunity to produce additional solar energy for addressing climate issues. So in terms of what has changed since we last put the tax credits in place in 2018, the Trump administration put tariffs in place on solar panels and while we were successfully able to moderate the effect of those panels, thanks to those tariffs, thanks to help from members of Congress, they still are impacting the solar industry. We had 202 gigawatts less of deployment in 2018 because of the tariffs and loss of 8,000 jobs and that's just a conservative estimate of the impact that they have had. And so we are continuing to want to try to find opportunities to support advancement of solar. And so in addition to the tax credits, obviously infrastructure is a huge component of solar deployment. We need to make sure that we have the right infrastructure in place and federal policies to help make that happen. Be it for utility scale, we need transmission to make sure that we can get the solar to the cities and places with large load growth and then in terms of local more distributed energy areas, we need to make sure that we have the right interconnection policies and other transmission policies to support making it easier for solar rooftops to connect to the grid. In addition to that we are very supportive of energy storage. So as we see the growth of energy and storage we want to make sure that we see solar is going to obviously see a lot of growth but storage growing at the same rate is really important to make sure that we have the consistency in power throughout the day and solar can be a great solution for some of the resiliency hurdles that we can overcome. And so we are supportive of both extending the ITC tax credit to storage as well as some legislation to improve investment in research to make sure that we have the best policies and technology to increase the storage industry. And then on workforce so if we're going to get to 20% by 2030 we need to have 350,000 more Americans trained and ready to be working in the solar industry. And the solar installer is the fastest growing job in eight states we often go back and forth through the wind in terms of one of the fastest growing industries and these jobs aren't necessarily requiring college degree. We can have community college programs that have vocational training and other opportunities to get people of diverse backgrounds to get the skills they need to be able to help build the future solar industry. And so we're supportive of legislation to support the deployment of better programs and training to have the right skills, skilled labor force that we need. And then lastly we need to make sure that we're improving the permitting for rooftop solar. So right now there are about 15,000 different localities that approve permitting for rooftop solar. And they all have different rules in terms of the permit requirements and the timeline and it is really challenging for people to make sure that people get rooftop solar installed sometimes. And so in terms of I compare it to air conditioners are about the same in terms of how much it takes to the amount of energy and skills needed to put AC in your house versus solar and that can be very quickly done. And so we're working to simplify the process while making sure that it's as safe as possible. But we're supporting legislation to streamline the process and get voluntary tools in place and to help localities make the process easier for supporting solar development at all levels. And then as an organization in addition to focusing on federal policy we work at the state level as well. And interestingly you seem a lot of progress at the state level that is bipartisan and New York we're seeing progress in terms of the development of new standards. And then in South Carolina we had a Republican led state legislature and a Republican governor sign legislation that will increase the access to solar energy. And so we are looking forward to more opportunities at both state and federal levels to support the growth of solar energy. And with that I'll turn it back over to Jared. Thank you. Thank you. The final presenter today is from the Energy and Wildlife Program within the U.S. Geological Survey, Dr. Mona Khalil. Hi everybody, it's great to see you all here. I'm going to take a few minutes to take you back 140 years back to when the U.S. Geological Survey was actually enacted by an act of Congress at the last minute of the last session of the 45th Congress. This is how long the United States has supported government led science research for the benefit of the nation. So 140 years ago that was our role and that role still remains today. So our scientists think of that every day because a lot of our science is directly to benefit our nation. So at that time the legislators and the Academy of Sciences recognized that role. Fast forward that today and I'm still really thankful for their decision at the time and I'm also proud to announce today that just a week ago I found out that the USGS is ranked among the top 10 institutions in the world for Earth and environmental sciences. So when our colleagues learned that we were pretty excited because that's a recognition of the great work that we're doing. We are the Seoul Science Agency for the US Department of the Interior and we're responsible for four areas of scientific discipline. So we do biology, geology, geography and hydrology and you may be wondering well how does that have to do with renewable energy? Of course we do a lot of assessments on oil and gas and water and as you may be very familiar with the natural hazards work that we do. The biological side of the house is kind of newer to USGS but we also have a group of scientists that focus entirely on the life side of the USGS or Earth Science and that's a monitoring and studying the fish and wildlife. The reason why we're involved with renewable energy on the biology side is because of some of the conflicts that sometimes arise with interactions between wildlife and renewable energy. So you may be aware of some birds colliding with wind facilities. A newer problem has been the collision of bats at wind facilities and because that industry is growing there is concern from the resource managers, the ones that are actually whose job it is to protect endangered species and to figure out ways to conserve wildlife. That becomes a concern for them and what I failed to mention is that at the USGS we are not a policy making body within the DOI. We only stick to the science so I wanted everyone to know I'm not going to make any policy recommendations today. So as energy infrastructures often placed outside of the major public centers. We often don't see a lot of it but that's also where a lot of our wildlife is using that same space. So it's important for us to incorporate science the best way possible the best available science to help site the renewable energy the new growth that's going to go out. I'm going to give you a couple examples of how we have in my opinion how we have worked with the industry and with the resource managers to help solve some of the issues that have arisen from this boom in renewable energy. So one approach that we are trying to develop and this is where we use a lot of our mapping skills and our mapping capabilities is to develop maps that show where on the landscape wildlife is located and where it is not. So if we can have good maps showing where developers can avoid certain types of wildlife that may be susceptible to wind turbines or dams things like that then we can inform the decision makers and the resource managers that help with these decisions or that make the decisions on how to move forward on a project we can give them better information to make the decisions on where to site solar facilities. This is kind of easy when you think of it in two dimensions when you look at a map you usually think alright there's my X and Y coordinate well a lot of wildlife actually use space in 3D we do that when we're in an airplane or when we're having fun with I don't know parachutes or something but this is normal for bats and birds to be using the space in 3D so this is kind of an uncharted territory for us thankfully for amazing advances in technology we're now much better able to track birds by equipping them with different kinds of tracking devices with GPS transmitters I mean everything we've tried it we're trying it on eagles or we have it figured out with golden eagles and smaller and smaller birds to get a better picture of where in the airspace they're actually what part of the airspace they're using, when, what time of year what time of day can we actually map out in three dimensions the migratory corridors for a lot of species that are going to be critical for their migrations, for their movements and then help developers provide them that information to help them make the decisions on where to site their projects so that's something that we're working on with solar utility large scale solar utility developments that's the the large projects are taking up space on the landscape and a lot of the developments that you may know very well are in the desert southwest so when you fly there or you look down you may see that you may think there's not much there but of course the desert southwest is very biodiverse and there are species there that are declining and that is a concern to the resource managers that we support at the Department of the Interior so for that reason we need better information same thing where we try to figure out where's the wildlife, we do the same kind of research but this time maybe on the desert tortoise and we have a project right now that's kicking off that's going to look at the desert tortoise populations in the Mojave Desert and figure out how these populations are connected because we know that the survival of the species is going to depend on their ability to find mates to find new food or new territories so again we want to provide information that decision makers can then use to plan projects in a way that don't fragment the connectivity between different species on the landscape my third example was on hydropower this is the first source of renewable energy and a significant contributor to the grid in terms of clean energy but even though it's been in place for decades challenges still remain on how to move fish or how other aquatic species can get across dams so our scientists have been working on this problem and you know scientists are curious people and they work really hard and so we're working really hard with electric companies with state, federal tribal partners to figure out how do we make a better fish passage solution how do we move fish from one place to another or how they can move themselves by making adjustments to dams and this is important because a lot of dams are undergoing re-licensing procedures now and so there's a need for new information when the dams were put in 40, 50 years ago or more the environment was different then the water resources were different and so we need new information to help with that process finally there are some dams that are actually being removed and so our scientists again are applying their expertise to figure out what happens when a dam is removed how can the ecosystem function there recover what happens how quickly do species come back and so it's a lot of great exciting discoveries that USGS makes and really it's applied science to help the decision makers really know the impact of our decisions so as we continue to focus on win-win solutions I believe we're on a good path to achieve our goals for clean energy and also wildlife conservation I think what we need is just to do more of it faster so I'd like to thank ESI and the House Renewable Energy Efficiency Caucus for organizing this event another year and it's great to be here and thank you for your attention we do have some time for questions though I'm told I need to remind you there's turkey hill ice cream still available in the exhibit hall but having said that any questions for the panels there we go we participate at the request of the regulatory agency and so for example if a Bureau of Land Management or the US Fish and Wildlife Service prepares a plan they may engage us for advice often times what they do is just they refer to our studies and they can request that we do certain studies and so that's how our scientific expertise can then transfer into those plans this is because we're recording we're recording my name is Lee I'm an intern in a group called Soul United Neighbors which represents solar homeowners across the country I have a question for Brine Selina primarily what percentage of US power do you think can come from solar to wind with our current grid and how much do you think storage can mitigate the need for natural gas backup for solar to wind I don't know the answer to your question about the current grid I do know that back around like 2008 DOE did a study that looked at how much wind could be produced and it said 20% by 2030 so I don't know if that was based off the current grid if there needed to be some adjustment I would assume the latter I too don't know the specifics on that I'm happy to follow up with you and get our researchers to provide that information to you I would say that in states like California we're seeing significant levels of deployment and so we know that the existing infrastructure can handle quite a bit of solar can't comment on wind specifically but there's room for a lot of growth in terms of other areas as well thank you any last questions yes ma'am about enacting different policies specifically tax cuts for corporations and stuff but a lot of the pushback that people have against renewable energy is actually the fact that they believe that it's going to displace them from their job so are any of you all corporations or companies looking at different ways to train people to displace from traditional energy jobs such as big oil or coal I'd say that we are certainly interested in programs to help people transition to the clean energy future and we are supportive of legislation that has been passed to get workforce training in areas around the country including in coal country and open to creative ideas of how else we should be making sure that we have the right training in place to get people employed because we certainly need a growing workforce and we need to make sure that we have a diverse workforce that represents the people of America yes so biomass is definitely seen as a good replacement for coal and a lot of the places that coal comes from are also forested so while my trade association doesn't have a training program in place some of our members do and I know that the Forest Service is supportive of types of programs that train young people to become foresters and to work in those types of industries so I think there's a lot of potential even if it's not necessarily happening right now I think that's where policy could play a big role but I think biomass is a good example of an industry that could potentially employ people that are maybe displaced from other fossil fuel industries