 Well, good afternoon and welcome to our Atoms for Climate Pavilion at COP28. And welcome to our session on the topic of getting what you pay for 24-7 carbon-free energy products. Thank you very much to NEI for hosting us and to the Pavilion for providing this wonderful space. Today we are going to be talking about 24-7 grids and how we get there and the role of the energy customer and the changing landscape between nuclear power producers and energy customers. And we have a distinguished panel. We are still waiting for one more panelist, so for those of you online and in the room, if another panelist slides in, don't be distressed, he's supposed to be here. So I'll start by introducing myself and our guests, then I'll give a few opening remarks and then we will turn to our distinguished experts to talk a little bit from their perspective. So my name is Miranda Ballantyne. I'm the founding CEO of an organization called the Clean Energy Buyers Alliance, which is an organization comprised of large energy consumers, corporations, institutions, and agencies that use a lot of power. And our goal is to get to a 90% carbon-free U.S. power system and a global community of energy customers driving clean energy around the world through the demand side of the equation. I'm delighted to be joined by Katie Ott from Constellation in the United States, a large power producer of zero carbon power, in fact, the largest producer in the United States of zero carbon power, as well as our colleague Cosmen Geeta, who joins us from Romania. And his company is Nuclear Electrica, a large multi-decade producer of nuclear power. We do hope to be joined also by a large energy customer, Microsoft, and if not, I've been working in the customer side for many decades and can easily fill the airtime. So why don't I start by letting our panelists introduce themselves, and then I'll talk a little bit about the history of direct customer to power producer, power purchase agreements, and the drive for clean energy. Katie, why don't you start by introducing yourself, tell us a little bit about Constellation power and how you see the landscape changing for the relationship between power producers and the end customer. Absolutely. Thank you, Miranda. Thank you for that kind introduction. I'm Katie Ott. I'm Constellation's Vice President for Sustainability and Climate Strategy. And in that role, I'm responsible for a number of things, but I'm responsible for managing our own greenhouse gas inventory. So we have our own experience as a buyer, if you will, of clean energy, while also being the largest producer of carbon-free energy in the United States. So one out of every 10 electrons and clean electrons in the United States comes from a Constellation energy generation source. So that is largely from our nuclear fleet. We own 25 reactors in the United States. That just jumped from 23 after our acquisition of the South Texas project, which is very exciting. But we also have significant hydra resources, solar, and wind. And together, it creates this portfolio of what we call 24-7 clean-firm electricity. And this is where I think there's a lot of interesting growth in how customers are thinking about procuring for their own portfolios. And increasingly what we're seeing is that customers aren't just looking for that clean energy. They're looking for that clean energy around the clock that's reliable, that's going to show up when you need it. Because our promise to customers is that when you turn that light switch on, no matter what time of day, no matter what the weather is, your light's going to turn on. So it's exciting to be here today to talk about certainly the supplier perspective, but maybe also dabble a bit in the fire. Thanks, Miranda. Wonderful. Cosmon, please introduce yourself and your company and tell us a little bit more about your perspective on the changing landscape of the relationship between power producers and the direct customer. Well, thank you very much for that question and thank you for having me here. What we're seeing right now, especially through the advent of SMRs, is we're seeing power producing getting closer to the customer physically. So also this happens with decentralized production of electricity as we're talking, you know, maybe consumer markets and others like that. But we're seeing, with the advent of SMRs, we're seeing a particular type of baseload clean energy that is coming right next to the large consumer. And this has to do with new EPZ rules, with efficiency and also security of supply, which basically replicates, at least in central and eastern Europe, a model for which a lot of the coal and thermal plants were used, co-located next to large industrial consumers that also service communities with extra steam. So in that case, for us in our neighborhood, at least, we see this, we see nuclear as being the new potential new thermal plant that can rejuvenate industrial supply chains. And quite interestingly, in our particular case, we're deploying a six pack new scale reactor on the former coal facility that was close to a steel facility. That steel facility was shut down. And after our announcement, now we're going to see, we saw an investor that came in, an Italian investor, and now we're going to have the first green steel facility in Europe built very close to us. So we're seeing that type of relationship. And probably we're going to see large customers wanting to own power, or at least the electrons resulted in an installation nearby. Now you also have large reactors, and those are becoming, and those are still intermediated through smaller consumers, be it households or small and medium sized consumers, through the grid. And we see large nuclear as being a great base load to support adding more renewables and cleaning up the grid, and keeping the grid where it is. But if you, with all the intermittencies going on, and with the support of large and nuclear, by having the large consumers taken off the grid through these co-location activities, I think you're going to have a healthier grid. Lastly, and definitely not least, we see the potential for value chains. Electrons become a simple input into conversion into something that adds more value. Be it data, be it steel, be it ammonia, be it, you know, whatever. So the fact that we can be right there on a facility helping out in that sense, I think that's terrific. Lastly, and definitely not least, what I've seen since the pandemic onwards is a lot of mom and pop conversation around the dinner table, around electricity in general, around power, around the type of power. If it's clean, if it's expensive, if it's not expensive. So the fact that we're having these conversations now, they were educated the public at a time at which the public is asking itself seminal questions with regards to power production that they wouldn't have done it in the past. I think the time is right to have more of these conversations. And show the facts, the truth. And I think that's going to create a better relationship between consumers and producers, be it if it's intermediated through the grid or physically co-located. Great, and David, welcome. You do have a hand mic, so rather than throw you into the fire since you missed the introduction, why don't I make a couple more remarks and then we will have you introduce yourself and Microsoft's perspective on these issues. And for our audience in the room and those who are live streaming, there were a couple of technical terms in their SMR, which means small modular reactor, which is one type of the advanced reactors. And I'm going to ask you to pull that thread a little bit in a few minutes. And the concept of prosumers, which is that more and more we are seeing, particularly commercial and industrial, but also universities and academics and cities and large national government agencies wanting to produce power on site, which they did actually many, many years ago. Large organizations used to produce most of their own power on site, primarily coal and oil. And we are starting to see a return to large energy customers producing and consuming. So there's this new term, prosumers. So let me give a little bit of background on the history of large energy customers stepping forward and saying, you know, rather than just paying a utility bill, we want to directly procure carbon-free power from the producers of the power. This is actually a relatively recent phenomena globally. In the United States, we saw the first utility-scale power purchase agreements for carbon-free power in 2008. Prior to that, we had seen some on-site work with solar in particular. Around 2008, we saw two companies. It was actually Walmart and S.C. Johnson. So while the tech companies do get a lot of credit, it was actually the retail and consumer goods companies who really pioneered the space of saying, rather than just pay a utility bill, let's directly procure the kind of power that we want that is not only reliable, resilient, affordable, but also carbon-free. In the early years, as that model has been replicated around the world, and it didn't only start in the United States, to be fair, but as that model has been replicated around the world, the primary focus has been on the underrepresented renewable sources such as wind and solar. And for the first decade or so, most of those contracts were with wind and solar producers. And very importantly, and we're going to talk a lot about the rules and rewards systems, the ecosystem of rules and rewards, both governmental and quasi-governmental, that drive customer behavior, that developed around this desire by end customers to have carbon-free power was developed in such a way that it actually incentivized a focus on wind and solar. And there were a couple of rules in particular that drove that. There was a focus on new assets, not procuring from existing assets, which by nature sort of penalized both the nuclear industry as well as the hydropower industry, quite frankly. And there was also a focus on renewability, and that, again, put a strong focus on wind and solar. And these rules and rewards systems are not necessarily governmental or regulatory, as you might think. It is things like the NGO accounting systems, how companies can actually get credit for the work that they're doing. All of this is currently under revision and rethink. And as Katie rightly noted, what we have now experienced with the leading energy consumers, and Microsoft, of course, is one of them, which is why they're invited here today. The leading energy consumers, many of them are actually achieving 100% renewable or carbon-free by buying on an annualized basis enough renewable energy to replace their kilowatt hour consumption for the year. Well, many of them are now looking at their portfolios and saying, yes, but at any given time, my facility may still be using carbon-intensive power. Or perhaps I have built a renewable energy facility that is simply displacing nuclear or is simply displacing hydropower and not having the same material impact that I hoped that it would. And so we're seeing a big transition in the energy customer community away from simply new renewables, which was really critical 15 years ago and was very successful in driving down the cost of wind and solar. And today, a shift away from a focus on new renewables and towards material decarbonization impact to achieve a grid, a grid, a systemic grid everywhere in the world that is carbon-free all the time everywhere. So that is a little bit of the history of this evolution. The rules and reward systems are all in process of being updated now and hopefully will be updated in such a way that they will drive customers to be choosing the most materially impactful projects, which may start to drive more direct interest between end customers and nuclear and, frankly, hydropower producers as well. So with that, I'm going to introduce our third panelist, David Frank, who is here from Microsoft. Microsoft has truly been a leader in driving innovation and directly contracting for zero-carbon electrons that may not come from your traditional wind and solar. And I'll let David talk about that. If he doesn't touch on all of them, I might add some. But David, please introduce yourself and Microsoft's interest in this space. Well, thank you for having me. Yes, my name is David Frank. I'm director of policy engagement in our environmental sustainability policy team. Firstly, apologies for being a bit late. I misjudged the amount of time I needed. And great to be here part of the conversation. As you've already mentioned, we followed in the footsteps of other great businesses and organizations who thought we're thinking very carefully about how do they use their buy power or their purchasing power to sort of both incentivize and support investment and also help us on our journey to deliver on our commitment to have 100% of the time, 100% of the energy we use from zero-carbon sources and absolutely recognizing the value that solar and wind and water power generation play in that space, but also the need for other zero-carbon generation. And hot off the press this morning, many of you may have already read it, or at least seen it, we published a paper this morning about our sort of position and thinking around the role of nuclear power in that mix, and in particular sort of our commitment and interest and investment in fusion power and the innovation of the future. This is going to help not just us run our business, but then through that how we continue to serve our customers and partners, which is clearly what we're here to do, and that's how we measure success. And we sort of think very much about how we use those sort of, if you already referenced the purchase power agreements that we have, but then we also have our climate innovation fund, which is a billion-dollar investment fund we run and operate, which we also use to sort of invest in the technologies of the future. And we look to be sort of a partner investor. So in many ways it's almost like a traditional venture capital model where we will be one of a number of key investors to help the businesses or innovators who are developing the sort of future technology in the sort of zero-carbon generation space to sort of get that proof-of-concept bill or bring a proof-of-concept to market, and they require the investment to do that. And then the sort of final point I sort of kick off with, but feel free to push me and I will try and answer, is we recognize we don't have all the answers, we're not alone, but one of the things we think about is how you use tech, again, I think picking up one of the points already made, how you use technology and the technology we build and the AI and the AI solutions to then help run network, electricity networks more efficiently, say that not only are you getting zero-carbon source energy onto them, but then people can understand their energy requirements when they need them, where they're pulling that energy from, when they could store it and so on. As I said, Microsoft is leading in so many ways in this space and I'm excited to dig into some of that. So, my colleague to my left, Cosmon, has to depart a little bit early, so I'm going to go to you next because I really would like to dive a little bit deeper and let's make this a dialogue, so anyone please feel free to jump in with your thoughts before we get to the formal questions. I'd like to dive a little bit deeper in a couple of areas. So first, you mentioned transitioning existing coal sites into nuclear sites using advanced nuclear and you mentioned small modular reactors, David mentioned fusion technology. Talk a little bit more about both of those topics. First, how replicable is it around the world in your view to take existing coal sites and transition them to nuclear? We are seeing some of this in the United States. I'd love to hear more about why that makes sense. And second, talk a little bit more about small modular reactors, maybe for some of our audience, either in the room or on video, who may be less familiar with these advanced technologies. So, the concept is very simple. As coal is going to phase out, you're going to have basically spots in the grid made available to put producing units to replace them. And my goodness, there's a lot of infrastructure there, right? Exactly. So that's where I'm going to it. It's exactly as if you've got a socket that was full and all of a sudden you have all these power outlets that are made available in the grid. So you can go stick into them a gas plant, solar, or small modular reactors, all of which need connection to the grid, all of which need different infrastructure, as you mentioned. And coal plants also need cooling, which is what nuclear needs as well. If we're to look at the functions of a coal plant in the grid, be it base load or be it rapid response, at least in the Romanian case and context, we felt like basically small modular reactors are a very good way forward to do that. And the advanced technologies that are out there to be able to produce next to communities is basically using technology that's inspired from nuclear submarines, where your operator drinks their morning coffee 20 centimeters out from the reactor. It's definitely, it's an enhanced technology. You can create these facilities that can not only keep the grid where it is and not need to have extra infrastructure costs, and that makes it very cheap, probably 15 to 20 percent cheaper than a few years ago. You're in areas that are relatively protected from seismicity, because at the end of the day, a coal plant needed to be also resistant to a possible earthquake. And definitely not least is the same function. So basically, you can provide rapid response and base load. Last and definitely not least, the communities there are very welcoming of power production. They've been doing this for a long period of time. They have schools and they have crafts, labor, that can be involved in this new technology. The case of Romania, actually, the first operators that were developed for our Chernivota facilities a long time ago came from coal plants. Some of the best operators did their initial training on coal in coal plants control room. So the conversion also of human workforce has been proven of being efficient. So you have everything that you need over there to deploy. Your alternative, of course, is to do gas plants that can have similar functions. However, in our context, given the fact that we want clean electricity, we don't want to pay a very high carbon tax. And we want energy independence. We don't want to depend or overly depend on imported gas. This was the way to go. And in terms of small modular reactors and advanced reactors, these are new technologies that are coming out now. They're not as new. So they've been actually around for 50 some years. But the context in which they're being deployed is new. And it has to do with mainly advancements in manufacturing. So right now, you can have anything prefabricated and assembled at very high quality controls. In the past, you couldn't. The first reactors that were built were actually small. And they were scaled up because of economicity. Think about it in terms of a suit. It's like an old large reactor was a suit made at a tailor shop. Obviously, control of every detail. You have planning around every detail. Every suit becomes a little work of art. How many of us shop at fast fashion shops that do very beautiful suits or very beautiful outlets that are similar to what you can get at a tailor shop these days because of advancements. But they become cheaper because of mass manufacturing and using patterns. That is the type of advancement that is being replicated in nuclear. And I'm sorry for overly simplifying, but that's basically the gist of it. You're going to get 80% to 90% prefabricated or industrial fabricated parts of the project and then have a smaller percentage of the overall project. So that, if deployed in mass, can really lower down the cost of construction of nuclear power plants. To such an extent, they will make it more competitive than other forms of electricity. But also, they will make small nuclear economic, which in the past hasn't been. Well, as someone who previously worked for the US Department of Defense and previously worked for Walmart, you've now touched on two things that I love, energy security and fast fashion. So how do you have nuclear, energy security, and fast fashion all in one conversation? You come to this panel. So let's transition a little bit to the discussion about direct offtake from industrial and commercial customers, whether that be corporations, whether that be US government agencies, whether that be universities, whether that be cities. So Constellation and Microsoft have actually done a project together. And Microsoft has also done a couple of other interesting direct offtake agreements. One in Ontario, one of the greenest grids on the planet is Ontario due to the combination of hydropower and nuclear. That was really, in my view, a groundbreaking transaction that we had not seen any commercial entities do a deal like that. And also a forward contract from Microsoft for nuclear fusion. So perhaps the two of you could talk a little bit about, what does it look like to do a direct contract with a direct offtaker for a product when it's not the common way that commercial and industrial customers buy energy today? What does it take in your companies? What does it take in innovation? And I know you have industrial offtakers directly from some projects as well. So why don't we open this to everyone? Katie, maybe you can go first. Sure, I'd be happy to. And we did have a great partner in Microsoft in launching, essentially, a new product, a new offering that we call hourly carbon-free energy matching. So the concept is, if a customer wants this 24-7 clean firm energy, we have set up a platform with the help of Microsoft that allows a customer to identify their exact load profile. And then we come in and we match that with the appropriate generation every hour of every day. And so that's what we launched with Microsoft, specific to one of their data centers in Virginia in the US. And what you saw there is that it really turned into a mixed product. Yes, there was a significant amount of existing nuclear that was able to provide power throughout the night and other times of day and seasons. But it also is coupled with renewable assets as well. And so what you do is you build this whole product to look at every single day and you match all of the appropriate generation. Talk about oversimplifying. I've really oversimplified the whole process here. But that's essentially what we were trying to do. There was a lot of work done with Microsoft. Because first, you have to identify their load profile. You have to identify where their hourly use is. Then you have to be able to track the generation by the hour. So you have to have a partner in the US at least. It's in our regional transmission organizations. They have tracking systems that they use to traditionally track RECs and other EACs. Well, some of them have now turned that into time stamping them. And so you know what hour of the day this megawatt was created. So you kind of mix that all together in this great platform that we built with Microsoft to be able to match a customer's exact load profile. So it's pretty exciting as kind of the new frontier in clean energy procurement. And it's something we're very excited about. And it's exactly, as you say, it's that innovation space. Both sites were learning as we were doing it. And we have to understand in a growing business our load profile. But it was incredibly important to us because if we are going to have a chance of delivering on our ambition of 100% of the time, 100% zero carbon energy powering our services, well, this is the only way we're going to be able to do it. And then yes, building on our platform, clearly we like to do that. And so yeah, we've learned a lot and we'll continue to learn a lot. And from that, I think it will help us further with policy advocacy, with regulators, policy makers in other markets, whether that's other markets in the United States or more broadly. Because electricity, as you all know better than I do, is both very local and it's also something everybody on the planet uses and needs. And actually to sort of, if you're giving me jumping back a moment to the point you were making around the sort of switch from one form of generation to another in a community, I think for us, one of the things that's equally important is that skills conversation. How do you show communities, continue to show community benefits, but then how can we show up or LinkedIn as part of the Microsoft family show up and bring the sort of insights they can to sort of policy makers around helping to that sort of green skills transition. To show that people who have those skills from building traditional generation with support and incentives in the right place can then adapt those skills to build the sort of generation of the future. Anything you'd like to add about complexities or benefits of selling to a direct off-taker versus through the grid? Well, it all goes through the grid to be clear. All the electrons go through the grid, but contractually. Well, there's also behind the wire type of, behind the meter type of transactions where you build, co-locate directly next to the client. And that in its sense has benefit for the larger consumer because there's costs associated with transmission and distribution. At the same time, all of the risks are shared in terms of construction and development. So when you do project financing, you basically go mingle. So it becomes more achievable to an easier to finance and develop such projects. Definitely you also have synergies with regards to operations and tapping into skill sets and workforces. So that can also further lower the cost of electricity production. There are so many threads that we could continue to pull here. And I'll name a few. And then as a group of discussants, we can decide which one we'd like to pull. I see a number of parallels with the early years of direct offtake of wind and solar. So in the early years of direct offtake of wind and solar, wind and solar were very expensive. Today, small modular reactors, advanced reactors are more expensive than say gas in some markets, not in every market. In the early days of wind and solar, we saw the first projects as behind the meter, rooftop solar projects. And then we moved to utility scale, power purchase agreements and virtual power purchase agreements. In the early days, we needed those initial, you know, Katie, what you just described about the project and the creation of the load and the creation of the technology to build that product together. Some folks in the audience may say, well yes, of course, Microsoft can do that because of their size and scale, but that's never gonna be replicable for everyone. We forget that it was only 15 years ago that there were no power purchase agreements for utility scale, wind and solar. And people said, well, of course, Walmart can do that because they're Walmart. And today that product is replicable by companies of all sizes in all parts of the world. So there's so many areas here. I'd love to dig into how important is that direct off-taker, particularly for small modular reactors behind the meter, in providing the guaranteed revenue over a longer period of time with a high credit worthiness. How important is that in being able to finance new projects, whether it's small modular reactors or the additional software and hardware required to use an existing mix of load? How replicable are the kinds of projects that you're doing? Whether it's behind the meter with a large institutional customer who's looking for that energy resilience behind the meter, or whether it's a complex blending of existing nuclear, new nuclear plus wind, solar, new and existing. How replicable are the projects that you all are talking about? And how important is the direct off-taker in that long-term guarantee of revenue in driving down the cost of tomorrow's technologies? That was a lot. So take it any way you wanna go. And then we'll turn to our audience for some questions. Yes. I think for us at Microsoft, having that long-term relationship is incredibly important. We learn from that. We learn from people who've got real depth of expertise in an area that we need. Obviously we need power for our services. And so the PPA group relationship is incredibly important. We also do recognize that we're in a very privileged position as Microsoft, but exactly to your point, it's also about how do we help others on that journey? And whilst each organization has to decide what's right for them, we also recognize if we can help develop that market and support innovation. Exactly the example you gave about sailor and wind, if a favor time price is declined, that's good for us as well. Say, because clearly, we're apologies. So yeah, so I think that sort of recognizing we're in a very privileged position, but how can we help build their investment cases, bring forward further investment in sort of further zero carbon generation that we can, we may then buy ourselves on another PPA game for it. I'd add a couple of things. It is, we may be at the front end of developing this type of product, this 24 seven matching of your load profile, but I do wanna make the point that it's absolutely necessary. If we're going to have a fully decarbonized energy system, you have to be able to match your load every hour of every day. And so while it may be a privilege of some sort for larger buyers at the moment, what Constellation is working on is making it accessible to all size of company, of entity that wants to procure this 24 seven power. And something that we haven't quite touched on yet are I think you mentioned at the beginning, the rules of the road. And I think that's gonna play a really big part in how this kind of develops going forward. Whether or not energy buyers are gonna be able to continue matching their electricity with annual type matching and what that really means going forward. At some point that gets to a natural end where you may say you're buying 100% renewable energy, but in reality you're matching it with annual REX and you're not fully, again, matching your entire load profile. So I think a lot of it is going to develop more rapidly as we get these new rules in place. Fashion, so apologies. But in true cop fashion, Cosmon does have to run to another session. We still have 20 more minutes, but Cosmon I'd like you to be able to give closing remarks before figuring out how to extract yourself from this incredible headset and making your way many miles across the campus here. The last piece I think we can resolve with a quote from high end literature, exit stage, right? So the first piece though, I wanna draw your parallel to solar. These are as replicable as long as we have demand and supply chains to support them. So look what happened to the solar industry in central in Europe. I'm talking in my own backyard in my own context. In 2010, the cost of one megawatt installed of solar was around 6 million euros. So what, and now it's at those dollars. Now the cost of a solar panel is a little bit south of one million. So what happened in the span of 13 years? Well, there was an incredible demand for these projects given by renewable mandates and supported by not a heavy but a very, very heavy and generous subsidy scheme that was supported by consumers, governments and everyone alike. So it took 13 years to come to a maturity at which we think renewables can possibly stay without government subsidies. Yes or no? But in the interim, we've had supply chains mature. We've developed knowledge and competency in deploying these type of forms of electricity. We've developed familiarity with them and in that sense, we've seen them deployed all around. The same thing needs to happen with nuclear and with small modular reactors because you will need base load to complement renewables. You will need complimentary forms of electricity. And if I'm to look at some of the UNFCC reports, maybe we're at around 47 to 50% of the technologies right now that they're still not at TRL level eight, at TRL eight that we need to achieve full decarbonization. So there is more technology support and deployment that needs to happen. But in the context of nuclear, which is our current focus right now, keeping the support alive for demand. And this is, I think it's only government support or subsidy support to activate a large order book is what can give the confidence to supply chains to invest and hopefully break even on their initial investment soon enough to drive down the cost. So the projects are as replicable as long as we have the government support as long and active enough, active long enough, sorry, to have supply chains and technologies mature to a very low cost of kilowatt installed. Similar to the solar and the wind industry that in Europe again benefited of 13 years of high subsidy allocation to drive down the cost six times. Well, that is a fantastic final word. And please feel free to, I see your staff pulling you out the door. So feel free to make the run and let's go back to the conversation about how replicable these technologies, contracting mechanisms. Yeah, let's leave it there. Technologies and contracting mechanisms. Here we are at COP 196 countries from around the world, all in various stages of the development of their power systems. With some markets still at the early stage of developing power systems and looking at some markets that are heavy in coal or gas and saying that's the direction we should go. What might you say about how replicable these approaches are to a global context? And Microsoft is in, I don't know how many countries you can tell us, David, but you're looking for these solutions around the world. We are, I mean, I think we have operations in over a hundred markets. And so we're not the only business organization with that sort of footprint. I think you're right. It sort of throws up some interesting conversations, some interesting challenges. If I think they to sort of, world I used to work in and sort of telecoms where you saw a similar different level of maturity, a market that might be at an earlier stage of that conversation. In one way that could be seen as an advantage because they can leap, like that leapfrog and they can see the sort of partnerships that we have and others have and think about. Landline telephone communications out to rural areas. They jumped directly to mobile. And so you could see a world where similar conversations are possible and gathering such as COP is a great place for those to take place to show what learnings do we have at Microsoft? What could we offer as our thoughts? And to sort of support policy makers or regulators as they think about how they develop their markets. Picking up the earlier point, what incentives might be needed to sort of support that change? I would also add, and perhaps takes us a bit wider, thinking about, we're seeing a number of regulatory interventions. Also my home area, Europe, there's sort of corporate sustainability reporting directive, but in the US, the forthcoming SEC carbon reporting rules, and we're seeing consultations in a number of other markets around the world where commercial entities have to either over the full ESG range or specifically on emissions report what their business is responsible for and what steps they're taking to reduce to zero. And I think those regulations bind on businesses, whether they're headquartered, certainly in the European Union context, whether you're headquartered in the EU, or just have sort of trading relationships within to the EU. And I think one shouldn't be excited about how that can also be a tool that sort of changes the conversation or makes things that five, six years ago might not have been on the table for conversation possible. Miranda, I wanted to pick up on another point you were making about the importance of these bilateral contracts to be able to support these technologies that Cosman was talking about. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the exciting developments in SMRs and Fusion, I very much look forward to reading your new paper, are exactly what this is about, right? It's setting up a system that allows us to procure for all of the resources that we need to decarbonize the grid fully at every hour of the day. However, it's also important that we mention the entire fleet of existing nuclear reactors that we have. So it's important that customers are also able to procure for those reactors as well, because the reality is once a clean megawatt is put onto the grid, the grid can't tell if it's coming from an existing resource, a new resource. And the signal that it's sending when buyers like Microsoft are procuring energy from an existing clean firm energy resource is that these are the resources we value and this is what needs to be developed on the grid. In concert with expanded renewable development, SMRs, Fusion, and all of these other things. But again, I just wanted to be sure to mention that it's the signal that these buyers are sending to get that right mix in the future decarbonized grid that we're looking for. And these topics become complicated very quickly. And what seems simple in some ways, great, a large energy customer ought to be procuring for zero carbon power actually becomes complicated quickly by this ecosystem of the rules and rewards organizations. And they include NGOs, they include government agencies at the local level, at the national level, sometimes at the regional level. And I think part of what I find so interesting and innovative about Microsoft's projects, all of the ones that we've described, but particularly Ontario and the project with Constellation. So in two North American markets, Canada and the United States is the decision to put a power purchase agreement, a long-term contract against an existing fleet of assets. For the reason that those existing assets provide carbon-free energy that is reliable, affordable, and available to the data centers and other facilities at all times every day. The reason why that's so innovative is that many of the rules and rewards systems do not support that kind of procurement. They push off takers to procure only new carbon-free assets. And there was very good reason why those rules and rewards systems were developed that way 15 years ago when we were really trying to accelerate the deployment of carbon-free assets. However, fast forward to today and what we're seeing is things like new wind causing, new zero marginal cost wind, causing existing hydropower plants to have to curtail and go up and down, up and down, up and down when they were not designed to do that. We are seeing zero marginal cost, very low cost wind and solar, which is largely a very good news story. The story that Cosman shared about the decline in cost of solar, largely a very good news story. And it puts pressure on existing assets that don't have that zero marginal cost. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about potentially the courage that it takes these early pioneers and how the governmental and quasi-governmental rules and reward systems such as the greenhouse gas protocol, such as the science-based target initiative, such as the federal systems, whether it's the EU systems or the US systems or other systems that are using those structures to write their regulatory requirements. What did it take for Mike, what were those internal conversations like to say we're gonna do a contract or two contracts, one in the US and one in Ontario, for existing hydropower and existing nuclear? How did those conversations go? That's a great question. And for transparency, it was before I joined the team I'm part of. So I can't give detailed insights into those sort of internal conversations. I would think they part of it was if you look, coming back to you, if you look at what our commitments are in a broader sense about being carbon negative by 2030 and even ahead of that by 2025, like 100% of the energy, 100% of the time from zero carbon, there was a recognition that those are both big ambitions but what do you then need to do to deliver on that? And that if we don't start, to your point, having some of the courage to go right, we're gonna do these kinds of partnerships and agreements for existing zero carbon generated power that we can use every hour of the day, then we are gonna really struggle to deliver on our own big commitments about how we want to, the business we wanna be and how we wanna show up in, not just an environment like COP, but in conversations with our customers and partners who themselves are asking us like, what are you doing Microsoft? How are you showing up? And so I think you could see it as part of that. And then it comes back to again, thinking about if we want also looking forward to be able to do these agreements, to commit to take power from fusion generated energy in the future or other new sources, zero carbon power. That takes time for that to be built and come online, but it also requires, businesses are gonna do that, need to know there's a market and that's moving now, shows that we're doing it both today with existing zero carbon generated power but hopefully also gives confidence for you and your colleagues, we're gonna be here tomorrow in the day after, say that it helps that longer term business case. So I say I wasn't part of those early conversations, but I think hopefully gives a flavor of some of where the thinking is at. Miranda, I wanted to pick up on something you said about the incentives in the greenhouse gas protocol and otherwise. And I think it's important to point out that as it's currently written without getting too far in the weeds, scope to accounting, doesn't penalize existing resources, it just doesn't advantage them in the way it does new renewable resources. And I think what's really been interesting at least in the US is the policy changes that we've seen. So there have been several states in the last year alone that have either passed a new clean energy standard or changed their renewable energy standard or what we call an RPS renewable portfolio standard to be a clean energy standard. Some examples are Michigan and Minnesota just this year. North Carolina changed their RPS into a clean energy standard to account for nuclear. And I think that's in that policy space is where we're seeing kind of the reality hit that we're gonna need all of these resources. So we better start changing our policies to reflect the grid that we want. Yes, so I think a good lesson there for policy makers, whether it be at the state level or at the national level that creating carbon-free or clean energy standards, skipping leapfrogging over that first generation of renewable portfolio standards, which of course, clean energy and carbon-free energy standards do of course also support zero carbon renewables. So that can be included in the portfolio. And then the ecosystem of rules and rewards will be built around how you achieve that ultimate outcome. And potentially a recommendation for large energy users who are thinking about their goals is to really look at the impact you're trying to have in the world and work with suppliers to design products that help you achieve that impact for your unique situation. Industrial customers, commercial customers, cities, they all have different situations and a suite of procurement approaches is really what's needed for large customers to be able to design what they need. Unfortunately we don't have time for audience questions which may have been logistically challenging anyway. So why don't we do a rapid fire closing with maybe just 30 seconds on what is your biggest hope and optimism for the next, let's keep it manageable for the next 12 months between now and the next COP, which hopefully we will know soon where that will be. What's your biggest hope and optimism? You want me to start? Well, I like the timeline, that really focuses it in there. I think first we wanna see more leaders like Microsoft getting out there, doing these 24 seven deals, we know how to execute them now, we have a couple of examples. So I think that first, leading by example. And then also, as you know, the greenhouse gas protocol is undergoing a bit of a rewrite in the next 12 months. And so I'm optimistic for some leadership there as well to recognize the changing environment that corporate buyers are in. And hopefully the protocol will be updated to reflect that. What's my optimism? I think optimistic, similarly the sort of reviews whether it's the greenhouse gas protocol or other sort of agreements sort of continue to incentivize and support, not incentivize rather, support investment and uptake of zero carbon power. I think I'd also hope to continue to be optimistic that we will continue to have these sorts of great conversations. But recognize that at the same time, these need to be local in the communities in which we operate and live, so optimistic. Well, thank you both and please help me thank the panel and NEI and the Adams for Climate Pavilion for hosting this conversation.