 with Epri. I wanted to thank you all for making time to attend this Digital Grid Virtual Workshop event. We're delighted you could be here and I'm pleased to be your host today along with our keynote speaker Mark McGranigan and our distinguished panel. And that will be speaking. I just wanted to first, in addition to welcome you, go over a little bit of housekeeping. Presently, for those of you who are attending, everyone is auto-muted given the size of the number of attendees. There are two ways that you can ask questions during the webcast. One is to hit the chat feature at the bottom where you can see there where it's noted. And you can type in a question. You can also submit a question by raising your hand as indicated in the WebEx toolbar and we can at the appropriate time unmute you to ask your question. I will say that for this chat and for the size of meeting that the chat feature is probably going to be the most convenient way to ask your questions. So we invite you to do that. We are recording this webcast session. So your participation is your consent to that recording. And the recordings of this webcast and the presentations themselves will be posted on both the EPRI and Stanford websites at the appropriate time. And we will provide that information once it is available. So we are really excited about this this week's sessions and some sessions to come that I will touch upon. And some of the objectives for this week's sessions. We want to present a vision of what a shared integrated digital grid represents. And that will be followed by the convening of experts here that we've assembled here today for our U.S. Utility Panel as well as in our successive panels over the next two days to discuss gaps to achieving this vision. Principally a gap that has been identified through some prior discussion preceding this event around enabling data platforms to enable a digital grid. And if you have received some of the material that accompanied the registration you may have read briefly about this and we will be talking about this as a theme throughout our session. We will be discussing here as well particularly today understanding some of the utility requirements and plans around this digital grid vision which again can entail many different aspects. And also discussing some technology solutions to help bridge those gaps. And that will be one of the themes of some of the upcoming events as well. And this is all really intended to help inform a robust research roadmap as an industry. And to hopefully inform a collaborative research initiative that is very much a priority for EPRI on behalf of the industry. And as you can see there in the chart on the right there are many different aspects that a enabling data platform for a digital grid can encompass with the customer being at the center. And in very general terms one of the ideas that Mark McGranigan will articulate is the idea of being able to integrate customer resources, customer DERs, customer technologies in a variety of ways that can assess that can improve the flexibility of the grid and in a way that doesn't compromise the value that the customer receives from his technologies. So there are many different aspects that are involved from integrating this batch to ops and planning, the application of AI, common information models to enable a transactive energy paradigm, all with data security for the customer being paramount. So these are just some of the aspects that will be touched upon over the over the sessions to come. Just a bit of background here and you know EPRI is pleased to co-host this series with the Stanford Bits and Watts Initiative. We have been working together for a number of months originally to plan this as a physical workshop that was to have taken place in March. Obviously circumstances are such that we weren't able to do that physical workshop but these virtual workshops, these webinars are the substitute and fortunately we're able to continue in this way. A brief word about each, you know, EPRI is an independent non-for-profit research organization. We're focused on research on the generation delivery and use of electricity and it's for the public benefit and our research is ultimately aimed to improve the, to advance the safety, reliability, efficiency, affordability and environmental sustainability and health of electric service through collaborative research. Speaking briefly on behalf of the Stanford Bits and Watts Initiative and pleased that Liang Min and his colleagues have been instrumental in helping to set these meetings up and have been a wonderful partner for us. The Bits and Watts Initiative is a major initiative at Stanford focused on digital innovations for the electric grid and their mission is to help advance business innovation, policy supporting, customer control and end user technologies to recast the relationship between consumers and the grid. And really both of us and I also want to acknowledge VM Ware that has been a contributing sponsor and has done a lot of work to help in setting up the, in planning this event and the events that are following this week. But we all really share the same workshop goal overall, which is to convene the experts that you see here and over the next few days, experts from the utility space, from technology, academic leaders, that'll be something here throughout the summer, to develop a research roadmap for the standardized data platform to help interface customer DERs with the grid and ultimately informing a collaborative research initiative. And the last bit of housekeeping, again, this is just the start of upcoming events. This week, after today's event, we will have our European utility panel that will be happening at the same time tomorrow. Liang Min from Stanford will be hosting and Arun Majumdar from Stanford will be the keynote. And Maher Chebo from GE Digital will be the moderator. And then on Thursday, at the same time, we will have a technology panel. And the keynote speaker will be David Tenethouse from VMware and the moderator Nicola Pio-Molter from VMware. And finally, and lastly, we are planning a weekly summer webinar series beginning July 1st, that will probe in some more detail aspects of the integrated grid and digital grid. And we will have some academic and technology and other experts provide some detailed perspectives on their research and other ongoing activities. So we're very excited about that. And both the Stanford and EPRI sites will be repositories for this information. So you will be receiving notifications about this and we thank you for your participation. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to my colleague, Mark McGranigan, Vice President of Innovation at EPRI to give our keynote address and the vision for the digital grid. So Mark, turning it over to you. Okay, so I'm now the presenter. Does that mean I can move the slides or are you going to move the slides just as a curiosity? You should be able to move the slides, Mark. So I can. Okay, beautiful. All right, thanks a lot, Omar. And I'll second Omar's comments that we're really delighted to be co sponsoring this series with the Stanford Bits and Watts program and VMware and and really look forward to this being a kickoff to a very interesting and I think a useful series of discussions that can help move this topic forward around the digital grid. And I'm especially interested in this aspect of integrating the customer and the community. And I think you'll hear a lot about that in these next couple of days. Today's today, we'll get a perspective from from some US utilities that are very active in this innovation space. And tomorrow, we'll get kind of a European perspective, which is very exciting. And I thought I just started off with a discussion of, you know, what we're talking about with this digital grid and customer integration. And we've been talking about the concept of an integrated grid for a number of years now, kind of move from the smart grid terminology to the integrated grid to really emphasize that it is about distributed resources, the customer, the community, all being part of, of making the grid as efficient and, you know, optimized as possible. And I like to use this, this phrase at the bottom where we talk about taking the fact that we're going to be managing our energy use locally, community, household building, more and more, there's more more technology available for that. And our challenge as a utility is, is making that local energy optimization part of the global energy optimization optimization. And that's what the integrated grid is all about, taking advantage of those resources, making them part of the, the operation of the grid. And a lot of it comes down to this question of flexibility, as, as we decarbonize and integrate more and more renewables that are variable, intermittent storage is a solution that storage could be in an electric car that's in someone's driveway, it could be a large bulk storage system on the grid, or it could be a storage system that's integrated with a local PV system on someone's roof. And, you know, equally it could be in folks smart appliances. So there's a, there's a huge opportunity to realize some of this flexibility requirement from local resources, whether it's capacity management, frequency regulation, handling ramping requirements, whatever it is. And that's, that's part of this integration equation. And it's providing another value possibility for customers and communities to, to participate in a grid where they may have additional value streams of improving their own efficiency or resiliency. But this flexibility part of the equation is, is, is very important, I think we coined this phrase of the shared integrated grid that Omar mentioned, developed a little video about that that you can track down on the internet, I'm sure just looking up shared integrated grid, you'll find this, we're not going to listen to it today. It actually is about four minutes long, and it gets you get the same message over and over again. But it's, I think it's a cute, cute video and useful. But the concept is that household building community can be part of, of the grid and managing the grid. And there's a there's a lot of examples of this going on around the world. I have a project that if you're following the Department of Energy and their upcoming initiative that they'll be putting out a request for proposals on around advanced buildings and smart neighborhoods, they really highlighted this smart community concept that Alabama power of Southern Company has has put in place near Birmingham. And that that's a great example of what smart home that integrated with grid operation with storage and a community PV. The Exelon has the Bronzeville community that starts to tie in a lot of community concepts, resiliency, micro grids, as well as efficiency and other community services. I'm coming from you in Ireland today. In Ireland, we have a project on the Dingle Peninsula, that is a real forward looking project of enabling individual households and the community to participate in efficiency, electrification and resiliency needs of the grid through their their flexible operation, and put a platform in place for that the next next year they're going to be doing peer to peer trials for energy management within that that community in a Dingle Peninsula. And I like to use the Australian example, as many more examples around the world, but I think in terms of virtual power plants and distributed storage in particular, you know, you're seeing you're you're seeing major advancements in Australia is just in South Australia, you know, stage three of the virtual power plant trial there is going to have 50,000 homes that will have energy storage be 250 megawatts and 650 megawatt hours of storage that that can provide flexible flexibility for the grid. So it's a great example. It's taken off. There's a platform in place to integrate that virtual power plant with with the market. And so it's some some real good examples that we can track as we go forward. And we'll hear about some some of the work going on from our utility folks that will be on the panels both both today and tomorrow. So we got we do have a lot of challenges. And that's what makes it interesting from an R&D point of view, as we try to achieve this integration, we're really still working on the architecture to figure out how to integrate the internet of things kind of devices, smart appliances, customer technologies with the grid operation. So that's a that's a challenge. We need communications to make that work. We're seeing a lot of a lot of innovations in that space, private LTE, but secure ways to take advantage of the existing communication infrastructure on the internet, how it interfaces with the market. We mentioned this brilliant example, that a lot of challenges and innovation that's required there. And we need to make this actually part of the way we plan the grid, or we're not going to really make that value proposition available to to customers and communities. So modeling approaches and tools to to integrate these distributed resources and the customer with our planning approaches, and then then actually operating those systems through a DERM's distributed energy resource management system, and other approaches. And all that is going to depend on on some platforms that have have open and and standard APIs and interface approaches for sharing of information between all the stakeholders is secure and and recognizing the privacy requirements of that information as well. And as we look at, especially here in Europe, where the transmission and distribution system operators are definitely different companies that that requires a lot of coordination between between those entities as well. So these are some of the challenges that we're working on from our point of view. And we want to chat about in these in these panel sessions, but but we're very excited about about the opportunities. One thing that you'll see is demonstrations going on around the world. We've created a demonstration site that tracks some of these demonstrations, and we're continuing to expand that that you should be able to find that IG demos at every dot com. And under keywords, see some of these demonstrations and track progress on them that are going on around the world. So that's exciting. And really look forward to the discussion. I'm going to be on here. I would encourage you to use the chat function that's available. Go you can go and introduce yourself on the chat and I'll be watching it to ask questions and we can use that to bring questions forward to the panelists as well. So just a suggestion. We've had good success with that on the COVID-19 webcast that we've been doing and other other activities in the virtual world over over these past months. So look forward to the discussion and thanks again to Liang and the team at Stanford for helping put this together and being aware for for supporting it. Thanks a lot Omar. I'll turn it back over to you. Great, Mark. Thank you very much for for laying out that the vision. I'm going to turn it over now to our moderator for today, Rish Kothigar. Rish is a senior program manager in our information communication and cyber security research area and he'll be leading the session and introducing our panelists. So Rish, turning it over to you. Thank you Omar. I appreciate that and you can hear me right? Yeah, that's great. So thank you for an excellent background. That's very helpful. You know, Mark set the kind of groundwork to some extent on what actually the whole area of digital grid and what emphasis we are planning to here at every in terms of focusing on the customer resources, right? At the end of the day every electron that gets generated is because somebody wants it, somebody wants to consume it. So customers become a very integral part of this whole equation of integrated grid and also playing a very key role in determining the reliability, resiliency, efficiency of the electric grid. So that with that team we have a you know amazing talented and expert set of panelists today that represents you know different parts of the country, the electric utilities that are from all the way from east coast and all the way to the west coast and in the middle as well. So with that, so I can move the slides, right Orlik? All right, so yes, you can. So these panelists will describe in general focusing on the United States because you know we do have a panel tomorrow that's focusing on the European context. From the US context we're looking at experiences, what are utilities doing in this space that are very relevant that we all can learn from. For me the challenges are very important because challenges let us know what where the opportunities really lie and what should be done and to address those challenges, what technology solutions, what aspects of tools development, you know communications etc are very relevant. Then and finally the focus on this particular you know initiative is on the data requirements because you know digital grid needs automation, automation needs information exchange, information comes from data end of the day. So if you want to look at that the data becomes a solid foundation for everything. That is something that has changed quite a bit in recent years, you know the whole area of data analytics, optimization, modeling has become a very critical part and the more data and accurate and high frequency data you have more you know reliable forecasting for example you could have and also lead to new services and business model from the utility perspective. So with that you know the customer side of resources is our emphasis but from the grid objective how can we improve grid flexibility, reliability and enhance customer experience. So these are some of the key themes that this panelist will be talking today. The way we have structured the panel today is each of the panelists will provide prepare remarks. We have three panelists and each of them are on 10 to 12 minutes. They will provide a prepared remarks, they have presentation. Then we will have an interactive discussion. Our plan is to have at least around 20 to 30 minutes for interactive discussion. As Omar alluded to earlier you know if you have any questions feel free to send us in the chat we'll be monitoring that you know and then plus the interactive discussion raise your hands. We do have some curated questions as well that might help just in case we do have an opportunity to ask more questions to the panelists. We request you to mute your audio to limit your background noise. By default everybody is muted just for information. The panelists that we have today three people that I mentioned I'll start from the you know the alphabetical order started with the name of the utilities John Hicks. He's the director of IT network engineering and operations at Ameren Corporation. John has worked all his life in Ameren's engineering and information technology area for the last 33 years. A very knowledgeable guy at least you know every time I talked to him I learned something new. He's got his bachelors in electrical engineering from Minnesota and MBA from Webster University. He's also the pre-advisory board for information communication technology program. The second you know expert and panelist we have is Lara Pierpoint. She's the director of technology strategy at Exalon Corporation. Lara is one of the very amazing you know very active women I have seen and who brings in a great set of passion knowledge in this field. She at Exalon she focuses on energy technology innovation and leads the corporate strategy team in advancing energy technology trends very suitable topic for panel today. She has PhD from MIT engineering and dual MS degrees from MIT nuclear engineering and technology policy. The last panelist of you know equally prominent and equally knowledgeable is Larry Bekkerdhoff. He's the vice president of grid architecture at Portland General Electric on the west coast. He advances e.g. a strategy to build a grid of the future and one that is resilient, smart and adversely energy future. All very again relevant to today's discussion. Larry has ESN electrical engineering from Montana State University. He's also on the upgrade advisory committee as well as Stanford University's bits and boards advisory council. With that introduction to the panelists I'll open the panel to John Hughes for his prepared remarks. John, please go ahead. John, can you hear me? You must be on the yet. Marish, can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you John. Thank you. Sorry about that guys. Thank you for inviting me to be part of the panel. Rich, Mark and Omar I'm excited. I'm very excited to be on the panel with Larry and Laura as well. I just a little bit about Amron. We're based in St. Louis, Missouri. That is the gateway arch that's probably the symbol for our territory. I'm not sure how to advance the slides, Rich. That already does. John has the control to advance the slide, so you want me to. You should have the control now. Okay, great John. There you go. Got it. Thanks. So a little background about Amron. Our service territory is 64,000 square miles just south of Chicago. The excellent territory up there through the eastern two-thirds of Missouri. We have six million people that we serve, roughly 9,000 employees. In Missouri we have 10,000 megawatts of energy generation, nuclear, hydro, coal, solar, wind, and combustion turbines. We've got 2.4 million electric customers across the two-state 900 plus gas customers. 7900 miles of transmission wire, 4,500 miles of which have OPGW, or we'll have. That's the fiber optic communications that we're installing. And we have an current investment through 2023 of over 11 billion dollars in the three companies to transmission Amron, Illinois, and Amron, Missouri. Just a quick comment. I think it doves tails with some of the high-level objectives that Mark alluded to and really what each utility strives to be, and that is a good steward of our resources starting with the environment. We've done a great deal to lower our carbon emissions since 2005, almost 24 percent. We have a target of production of 8 percent by 2050. Along with that we've already reduced by 49 percent nitrous oxide as well as sulfur dioxide emissions. The energy plan in Missouri, we're investing 5.3 billion dollars to upgrade the infrastructure in Missouri. That's going to include a life cycle generation on meters from AMR to AMI utilizing those meters as part of our customer portfolio. The smart energy plan also will be upgrading a lot of our equipment and grid operations. You'll see a lot more distribution automation, a great deal more, and eventually we want to embrace more DER, if customers additional choice and how they utilize our energy. We'll talk a bit about that. That work also creates jobs in both states and so that's a positive that our customer base and folks that live in our territory. The vision of the future, the energy environment is going to change drastically. Working with that grid we like to say that the center of value is going to be the grid. No longer is it the big coal plants generating power, it's going to be how we make and provide access to the grid for customer choice for capabilities and reliability. We see customers will have new ways to get involved with how they consume and use our products, the two-way flow of energy storage as you talked about, different electrification capabilities. Grid modernization and smart technology should provide greater control of value to the customers. We illustrate a customer example on the right there, different choices through an app. There's also different choices about how they sit and work on the grid. Can they be a partner of the Amherst? Can they drive energy efficiency? The key thing here is utility companies, we need to be agile, we need to be customer-centric, innovative. I think Amherst's leadership is not a lot to be innovative. We do see electrification of the transportation and major manufacturing industries is really where the future of demand is going to come, so we have to be ready to support that. And that's a distributed load, but it's also a distributed source that we have to consider. I look at some of the emerging technologies that we've actually tested in. At Amherst, we have a large technology assessment center built in Champaign, Illinois. And in that facility, we have everything from wind and solar gas generation, battery storage. It's grid connected. It's a micro grid control with both secondary and traciary controls. And we use that platform also to provide customer appliance testing, smart lighting testing. So it's been a great asset to prove out capabilities around distributed energy and how to manage those capabilities. It's a center where we can engage customers as well as manufacturers to think about how the future would look. How do we engage customers? Some of the things that we've been dealing with, cybersecurity and that will, we work with Rich and Epri on a simplified version of terms management using the open source tool. How do we build an architecture for communications? And understand I come from a communications background, so that's my primary focus. And the one thing about being in the network team is you get a little bit of everything the industry and the company's doing because you're the connected piece of that fabric. Machine learning is another area we're doing some work. Customers will benefit by getting more intelligent offerings, more of an omnicustomer approach when they contact us. But soon that will be available in operations, smarter devices, better suggestions on where problems and opportunities, predictive maintenance and troubleshooting. We're already doing drone testing. We've got waivers with the FAA to do the online site testing with drones on our transmission lines using communications with those drones to capture images and do assessments. That's still on pilot. Augmented reality, we've done a number of different examples of augmented reality. That's more for the co-workers capabilities, but it does improve cost and reliability. We've done a lot with virtual reality in our nuclear plant where we train and teach people how to operate steam pipe maintenance through virtual reality classrooms. It's been very successful. That's in a daily use. Again, I talked about the distributed energy already, things like hole sensors. We'll add more data points to our network, expanding customer services control around energy efficiency. In Illinois, there's a mandate. We're doing things with bulkware optimization. We want to do more with the capabilities around DERs. Again, the electrification of transportation will work with manufacturing industries, making sure that we have electrical driven forklifts and equipment of that nature. I think the one thing I'd like to just stress is all these capabilities come through different processes and services. And everyone else's process and service relies on data and touch points. But without that fabric of the network, you're not going to get any of that. So my focus and a lot of my conversation today will be building network to give you reliable data and access. When I look at Amron's strategy around the foundational grid from a network perspective, we want to minimize dependency on carriers, lease services, move in a way to a private network. We feel we have greater cybersecurity, control, better reliability and recoverability. And so we put a lot of effort into building out a robust backbone using fiber optic communications. Work we worked and designed this MPLS network working with Epri with Tim Godfrey's group. We think that we can lower our overall operating expenses substantially over a period of time by building our own networks. We also piloted and installed the first pilot outside of Southern Company on a private LTE. We tested over 14 use cases that was published in UTC and we did a lot of research with Epri on those capabilities. The success of that was greater than we anticipated. Not only was it more reliable, it was easier to install and we even built in failover with that. So we're currently looking at moving all of our 20 existing wireless network solutions into a private LTE. We'll still maintain a mesh network for our majoring systems but the backhaul on that will come to that private LTE. And again, a standardized packet-based end-to-end network gives me a standard platform for which I can move data and have access. The network will be segmented based on business and reliability. And again, some of the efforts I outlined there, working with Epri, work with Tim Godfrey on an energy roadmap with the Department of Energy industry published research with the private LTE and cellular carrier QoS. We are founding members of the utility broadband alliance in which we encourage Epri to keep a pulse on and have also been working with no T and AT and T on some of these aspects. So high-level that's am I don't want to consume too much time. Any questions or comments or Rush, you want to take it over? Thank you, John. Thank you for that excellent presentation. Yeah, we do have a few minutes and thank you, John, for presenting that on time. You know, if any, you have any questions, I don't see anything on the chat, Orly, but I'm not sure if anybody has raised a hand to ask questions to John. I have a quick question. Okay, there was somebody. Was it Mark? That's Mark. Yeah, I didn't. I was at process of typing it on a chat, but I'll go ahead and ask it since we got a second. John, in terms of kind of adopting the private LTE and the fact that you can take advantage of technology that's available for the Internet in general and probably helps. But how does the architecture fit for plugging in, say, customer technologies? That might be managed as part of the grid, whether it's electric vehicle charging or smart thermostats or customer-owned storage. How does that fit in the architecture with the way you're going? So great question. High level, the private LTE will extend our network and make it pervasive across that 64,000 square miles. So the intent is to have reachability to customers who want to participate, say, in rooftop solar control for power quality. And so those are elements we want to be able to provide the communications access into our network where we can control those inverters, make them a part of whatever terms management system we would employ, as well as the voltage optimization that we can pick up both from the meter and the feeder at the head end to help with that quality, control, and efficiency. In-home thermostats right now, I think you're going to see that travel through the public Internet because the people generally aren't going to want us to get in there and control those assets, but we'll provide an interface through an APN back into our network. So logically, the customer doesn't have to discern how they get through. We can make that access available to them, whether it's an app or a PC at home, but the meter connection would come through our network. And the other thing I'll tell you is a number of manufacturers are already including Band-Aid to 900s supporting a lot of their products. LNG has come out with a cell load them underneath the glass that supports Band-Aid. You're seeing a number of manufacturers looking at supporting either third-party modems or working with people like Sierra to put this technology. Long-term, LARC, what we want to see is ESEMs where we have over-the-air programmability of those devices for firmware and updates, but also that you can write different networks in our testing because we are controlling in telerupters and load flow on a production system which is still in production. We want those modems to be able to write our private network but if for some reason that wasn't available failover the public carrier. We successfully tested that. There was no notice of issue on the advanced distribution management head end and it took seconds to reconvert so it's very successful in terms of reliability. Excellent. Thank you, John. I appreciate that. I had a question but we did get one question on the chat and we have a minute John if you don't mind me asking that question. This question comes from Amprathaban Moodli and the question is John how does your utility deal with time sensitive services such as telecontrol on the packet-based network? Yeah, so excellent question and if we get too deep into it I'll probably have to get a research answered for you. Some of this work we did do with EPRI Tim Godfrey Ron Cunningham out of AEP was instrumental in putting a whole taxonomy on timing and utilities but specific to the telerupters all of our critical assets right on a fiber network and so we have might design under four milliseconds for transfer trip in the old analog days we put that on a packet-based network where we're upgrading our TUs we're seeing sub one millisecond response times and of course there's multi-pass for controlling those transfer trips right now we have a mix of point-to-point and packet-based but the primary is all being moved to a packet-based communication hopefully I answered the question Thank you, John I think you did we will have more time in the discussion once all of the panelists that run through the presentation so our next panelist is Laura Pearpoint from Excellent Corporation Laura, over to you Laura you must be on mute there you go okay for some reason your voice is breaking up is it me or okay it's better now thanks Laura oh you must be still on mute Lara sorry there you go can you hear me okay you can hear you okay hopefully that'll work Laura for some reason your voice is breaking up I can see a small icon on your screen saying that the bandwidth might be low Rich this is Omar perhaps maybe we could switch over and come back to Laura yeah there's Larry we'll do that Laura while you're working on it you know we'll come back to you give us 10 minutes and we'll come back to you on your presentation we're gonna go with Larry Larry if you're ready I'll just quickly move the slides to Larry all right good morning can you hear me yes I can hear you Larry great good morning and thank you and apologies on Laura's behalf and hopefully we get her back on because I know she's dynamic and Exxon has a lot to offer so I'm looking forward to hearing her remarks here as well so if we can do I have the slides do I forward here I think you should have the controls yeah there we go let's go to Portland General Electric okay all right well good morning and thank you for allowing me to participate on the panel I have to say that Epri and Stanford on the Bits and Watts are two of my favorite research groups and really love working with each of the teams and appreciate all the efforts that you're doing for the industry for utilities and for our customers I am very mindful of you know what has taken place you know here with the COVID and if you monitored and looked at the April emissions reports for worldwide emissions were down 16 or 17 percent which is phenomenal when we think about air quality we think about what our future looks like and I have to say that I believe customers are really going to be driving for decarbonization they're going to be asking us to do really as we go into this future and the digital world that we're talking about is is critical and we're not going to be able to accomplish these goals of decarbonization for the future without it and the image that I put up on the screen here is showing you on the left hand side which has been our traditional generation side of the business and here at Portland General Electric we are vertically integrated utilities so we still have both sides of this equation and how we operate and so share with you a few thoughts about maybe some advantages on that behalf but we've traditionally done the integrated resource plans we've thought about what it takes in terms of generation and we're having some concerns here in the west on you know what is our regional adequacy and planning tools and how we're thinking about the day ahead how we put markets in place different than obviously other places in the United States and across the globe but all this think about generation and I think we've done a really good job we've gotten to the point where we monitor we forecast we deal with that on a instantaneous basis you know really really well and thinking about our transmission the same way but over on the far right is what I'll refer to as the distribution side of this world and Mark alluded to distribution resource planning and we do not have good robust systems and thinking about the distribution network and what is required there we don't have as distributed energy resources all these customer dynamic devices that are going to be put on our system how do we see those what do they look like how much influence do we have on them and customers are really you know stepping up and I will say transportation electrification is probably going to be the single greatest impact on our system that we've seen maybe since Tesla Wessing House we're all thinking about AC and DC way back when it is going to have a significant impact on us and Mark alluded to flexible feeders and so if we're going to balance between the generation on the far left and the distribution on the right and to get to the decarbonization the 100% that many of our customers are asking for it's going to take this much in the distribution world as we have on the generation world and I've laid that dispatch up there at the top because utilities if we're going to provide those services in the center there we've got to be able to see both sides we need to be able to influence both sides and we need to be able to encourage both in the customer arena as well as you know new renewables on the generation side to form that 100% and so that's the challenge in front of us and as I flip to the next slide John talked about communication systems and so this is kind of a depiction that Anant Sundanaram from my team had put together usually I've got boxes that are kind of ugly and that he'd done a nice job of capturing here many of the aspects that we think about and the systems that we currently have and the systems that we need and there's a green box in the center that calls out grid management systems that we have not created yet we've got parts and pieces but are we really holistically have we figured it out yet such that like our generation we can model it know what it's going to do tomorrow and so if we've got a strain on the system what are we going to do at 3pm tomorrow and so we need those sensors we need the interconnection if you will to the field and as John talked about the communication networks that are in between of that those are the things that we've got to build out and we've got to think hard about how does transportation play in that and all the batteries if you will and vehicle to grid as well as grid to vehicle that flexibility of load is going to be huge for us and thinking about how we operate this grid of the future and if we don't have visibility into it if we don't have the sensors there then that becomes a blind spot for us and it becomes a portion that is really hard to deal with and we end up over building our system charging more for it and in fact having a difficult time dealing with those parts and pieces if we don't have visibility we don't have sensors there so it's really important for us to think about how these systems come together and how we operate that going into the future and providing customers the opportunity to participate in this decarbonization with us and so that's kind of what this last slide that I have is is depicting for a while as we're starting down with the architecture I thought a lot about this little depiction in the center of the page from a substation out all the different parts and pieces and you can see that it became the running man because we were all trying to figure out as quickly as possible how do we combine these how do we put these devices on our system and where they're going to be showing up and are we getting ahead of that well and that far left side you see it's decarbonization it's resiliency it's cost savings those are things that customers are really looking for and on the far right we have the grid which is thinking about the value of those devices the reliability of those devices and operational efficiencies and so we're going to be torn apart we're thinking both directions what is the customer value what's the system value and we need to really be able to balance that but it's going to take sensors it's going to take communication systems we're going to take the control systems up front to be able to do that and interface with those products and services so those are the challenges I see when we think about this digital world we're going to build a digital twin of our system and that digital twin is going to help us facilitate our planning our actual resource thoughts for the next day how much flexibility do I have on feeder A versus feeder B and if I combine those do I have enough to help balance on the system for the transmission issue that I might have tomorrow those are all the questions that we as operators have to begin to think through and provide that information to that dispatcher that's sitting at the the desk so I'm going to stop there look forward to further comments that hopefully we can get through on Laura and as well as the questions from the panelists so thank you thank you Larry really appreciate that excellent background another view of our utility but you know just trying to get looking to the common themes looking from John and you in terms of the emissions and the environmental stewardship that becomes very critical I don't think I learned is that you know how network and this smart infrastructure and communications become a backbone to enable that integration and data platform and flexibility for example and finally you know you can't address this environmental problem carbon problem without looking at all the sectors by the generation sectors or electricity use sector or transportation sector and how the network and the communications tie all of them together so excellent background I appreciate that we can we will we have a few minutes so we can open the door for questions from the audience do you have any questions only anybody raising their hands I see a question on talking about the digital twin all right if you have a question for Mark McGranigan on the jet I'll fit that on a question for all the you know attendees love the digital twin concept applied to the power system how far down into the community slash customer do we go you know that's the great question we traditionally have thought about just our distribution systems and you know I think John had mentioned the distribution automation and the equipment that we normally run you can see batteries etc being in a similar way you can see the inverters being in a similar way but we've got to go beyond that if we're going to get into actually building management so you think about all the chillers that are out there that are connected and how do we communicate then and start to enhance and use that as part of that flexible load if you will it comes in lots of different varieties I would say that we're thinking about it as John was and a neighborhood area network had a one step below what we call our field area network as a private LTE network where those devices communicate and I think you mentioned possibly through web is that the best way to do that but certainly we need to be able to influence and you know when you call upon it if you only get 60% of it is that a cut is that going to be enough for tomorrow's needs at 3pm when you hit the peak of the heat need to understand that and that's why flexibility and what are the metrics associated with flexibility out of feeder and how much do you have so much like we track maybe our generation profile to see how much hydro how much wind how much solar how much thermal we might have on the system at any one time we're going to be doing that with the distribution system as well and saying we have flexibility here energy efficiency was kind of locked down and helped us with capacity but these dynamic devices we're going to need to communicate with them on a direct basis and be able to influence a large number of them it's it's one thing I always think about LED lights and change out one in the house you didn't see any difference change out all the lights all of a sudden you saw a difference on your bill well it's the same with your customers if you have a few participating in our test beds and as Mark was describing these pilots that's one thing but if you have millions of customers participating it becomes a real flexibility that we need on our systems excellent thank you Larry appreciate that background let's jump into Laura's presentation I'll roll back to her presentation Laura can you hear me she must be on the audio she is trying to call in but I do not hear right now okay not a problem we'll probably give her a minute and then try to see if there's another question there is another question here on the chat the question from Mark McGranigan is community and customer storage part of the resiliency Larry oh absolutely huge I think that's again one of those selectability and as I talk about transportation I see that as part of the storage equation as well but you can imagine and we've been partnering up with I'll use Daimler as the example here building electric vehicles and thinking about charging stations and Epri's charging committee I know Maria Pope as our CEO is leading and working with Epri on that behalf it's when you're going to put a megawatt or megawatt and a half of a charger for a truck on your distribution system that's a huge impact and so you have to think about storage you have to think about buffering the system with batteries and so that flexibility gives you lots of options and then you start to think about school buses and how often are they running and when they're sitting still can you use them as part of that flexibility that you need on the system absolutely those are all key elements that we need to think about in terms of storage and if we can do that with homes you know I know there's a lot of test pilots going out there right now where you have hundreds of homes can you consolidate that think about the flexibility on a feeder given you have let's say four or five hundred homes on that particular feeder that becomes then real flexibility on a system so storage is key we're doing also microgrids and a number of communities really asking for that and so we built out a few examples now where it was starting as just their emergency operating centers they're going beyond that and they're starting to think further how they build resiliency in their communities for times where there might be a disaster an earthquake etc so we're seeing a lot of requests now where storage plays a different role in terms of resiliency excellent thank you Larry that's a good background and we were just looking at recently a discussion on not just you mentioned the flexibility metrics you know metrics whether it's power or whether it's energy right or it's both at some point of time you know about California looking at long duration storage looking at 150 hour of energy capacity right so each of those have different values to look into that stream that has different you know just meet the different objective of an electric grid so excellent background we do have one more question if you could quickly go over that this is from Ryan Fede the question is Larry can you speak to the change aspects of this shift absolutely and thank you Ryan appreciate the question I hope you're doing well past co-worker at Bonneville Power so appreciate the question I think we're making a real shift from what was in the past energy efficiency and many of our teams that interfaced with customers that was one of the key elements that we we dealt with customers and we worked with them it was all associated with energy efficiency and now we have these dynamic devices and if you really thought about dispatch system operations personnel line personnel they really didn't deal with the energy efficiency they weren't involved in that and now you're asking these planners these dispatchers to think about devices that you're putting on the system and how you interface with customers associated with that and so it's really causing a cultural change as well to think about using the advancement using these devices and no longer is it just about the system value over them on the right hand of the chart that's still shown you really have to start to think about the customer value and what are customers desiring and how do you provide peace of mind to them how do you give them a different experience how do you provide that integration of of their equipment and give them opportunities to use that and so the cultural changes is huge going from what was oh it's the sales team over there versus the operators over on that side of you're having to bring them together now and work collaboratively excellent thank you Larry let's give another shout out to Laura Laura can you hear me I just sent her some some information I'm trying to see if she can log in within a couple of minutes okay not a problem or late thank you for trying that so Larry we do have one more questions I skipped the order unfortunately I didn't see this earlier this is a question from Nisreen Krami and the question is how far can we go with the DER integration with less digital transformation well I think we're going to find that out and I can speak from a little bit of experience here recently on our own system here at Portland General Electric with solar applications for residential customers and net metering circumstances but where feeders you're trying to use an IEEE standard of 90 percent of the minimum loading on a feeder to right to make sure that if you don't have protection systems in place that you don't backfeed into the substation and your protection systems aren't capable of handling that that's a great example where we got into a situation where we've got a number of feeders that fall into that category their old electromechanical relays etc we don't have a protection system how do you make sure and model and provide the opportunity to work with that and so we had to go with a two meter system to be able to trip that generation offline if we get into a condition where the system can't handle that because otherwise you're going to spend probably a half a million dollars in upgrading all of the equipment the protection etc on that distribution feeder eventually you're going to need to do that but we're bumping up against some of those limits today and we need to solve that issue each time we run against it but it takes good modeling it takes the good forecast the digital information that provides that you can design a better system great thank you Larry I mean that's a very good question then what can you do now and what can you do with more digital transformation etc so I do see Laura on the call Laura can you hear us yes I can hear you can you hear me yeah please yeah I can hear you wonderful thank you all for bearing with me I of course wanted to make sure that I provided a really strong demonstration of the importance of a communication backbone as we're having this particular discussion so so great so thank you all again for for letting me join you today I'll give you some perspectives on Exxon and what we are doing in the realm of digital grid so to give a little bit of background on Exxon as a company we have 12 million customers across the United States a little over 10 million of those customers are in our regulated utility footprint comment in Chicago as well as utilities across the Atlantic Seaboard and we have another roughly two million customers within our competitive retail business of course we also have a generation in the competitive markets in several locations within the United States my role within Exxon is actually at the corporate side and I'm the director of technology strategy so that means that my team and I are really looking forward at what we what we see down the road and kind of around the corners with respect to technologies across the board for things that are of interest to Exxon and then of course specifically within the realm of digital grid type assets so to that end we run our R&D program and work with universities and national labs we also work with startups and sort of in early to mid stages of the innovation pipeline and in general we're looking for the things that we'd like to deploy in about a year to say three years or in some cases even longer than that if we see particularly game changing technologies on the horizon so I'll be talking a little bit about our perspective on kind of the future of what the digital grid might look like and of course as we talk today I'm happy to give some examples as well of what's already happening within some of our utility footprints but going to this first slide here I think it's really important to continue to ground and not just you know how we are doing things and what's available with respect to digital grid assets but really why are we taking the particular actions we're taking and of course we like others you know I think this has come up a couple of times so far today we're really focused on our customers and creating customer value and so to do that we think about what customers really want and what they expect from their electric service so the first important thing is you know I think all customers are really coming to expect sleek and easy interfaces they want to be able to interact with their energy systems the same way they interact through their iPhones with myriad other kinds of services that they elect to have in addition I think we're seeing a move toward integrated services and again I think you've heard fair amount about this already today you know energy and security and thinking about a whole home approach a way that you can have a single interface to interact with a number of things that that could work together within your home a lot of folks of course having digital assistance in their home and increasingly using those to control various aspects of their appliances within their house as well as other kinds of services as well I note here that this is where we get into really some of the important trade-offs particularly with privacy I don't put privacy here as kind of an end in of itself as a way that we think about privacy is that it's really a necessary condition for all of this work as it has been really for everything that utilities have done since their inception and what's interesting about this challenge with privacy is that customers approach it differently we have customers that really value the ease of use and really want to be able to move seamlessly from one kind of service to another we have other customers that are much more concerned about privacy and really want to see protection of their data as being front and center and sometimes there are some real trade-offs around how quickly and easily we can innovate and the extent to which we're really thinking about privacy protection so that's something that we always have in mind of course everyone wants 100% reliability or as close as we can get to that and that's only increasing in importance as our lives become more digital and more reliant on various kinds of electric appliances and then I note that some customers want more choice so that means that there are customers who are interested in really deciding very specifically what sorts of energy services they have thinking about the ways in which their energy efficiency interacts with distributed energy resources and options for grid power but I think part of what we see also is the majority of our customers want to know that they're getting electricity that is as inexpensive as reliable and as clean as possible and ideally they'd like to know that that's what they're getting and then to be able to sort of set things and forget them and think more about this sort of other kinds of value add services within their lives so then we think a little bit on the flip side of that what is it that we're thinking about as utilities and again a lot of this has come up today we're managing variable resources we're managing the integration of electric vehicles distributed generation and I think this is extremely important particularly understanding exactly what's on our system and how we can manage those system assets how to visualize those appropriately we're managing aging assets and as we do all of this of course thinking about the customer's needs I think part of what also makes this challenging and this is what my team tries to think about is not just the technologies but what are the business models and the institutional arrangements that really enable their effectiveness so we're thinking about how grid operators of policymakers and regulators play within these kinds of systems how we communicate with them and how having new kinds of digital assets and data can enable us to make better cases and have more open and transparent discussions with our regulators we also think about how we interact at the city level we think about our vendors and technology developers and then of course potential new institutional actors that in some regions of the country are not so new so we're seeing aggregators and demand-side system operators popping up in various places so thinking about how all of this ultimately fits together is very important so moving to the next slide then thinking about this a little bit further from the utility perspective we really are focused right now on some of the emerging infrastructure challenges as being some of the base issues that we're hoping to solve with some of the tools out there so certainly we're looking at distributed energy product we're seeing data as necessary for helping with electrification decisions and figuring out how to electrify where we also of course have decarbonization as very front of mind and we're thinking about how we make our investments and try to optimize those again you know as we see requirements from the public particularly for low carbon but other kinds of demands as well from the customer side of the equation in terms of the solutions that we're pursuing I think they're similar to what the what other folks have presented today both John and Larry are seeing within their electric territories obviously interesting user-friendly digital tools things that have very clear interfaces for communicating with our customers are going to be more and more important we also talk about machine learning AI other ways of ingesting and really utilizing our data and then of course thinking about those visualization tools that we're going to need to speak to our regulators in addition to our customers we think about data pools and of course this is an ongoing challenge that we have data across our enterprise it's really important to us to try to harmonize and to be able to utilize our data effectively and in our case when we have separate utilities across many different kinds of jurisdictions there's a lot we're trying to do to figure out how we can synthesize and harmonize and really provide value to lift all of our utilities at the same time which is very challenging and then finally you know to make sure that we're being holistic as we do this and as we go about this work we're really looking at what's happening particularly in Silicon Valley and in other big startup hubs around the country where we see really interesting new kinds of technologies and products that are emerging and we're trying to figure out to what extent do we bring things in house do we sort of you know similarly try to develop our own tools to what extent do we partner with folks outside and to what extent do we potentially even buy or start to acquire various kinds of technology solutions go to the next slide so I'll conclude with just a few pieces of information about some of the things that we're doing a little bit more on the bleeding edge of the R&D side we're partnered with Argon National Lab in a project that we're calling Array of Things so Argon and a team there led by Charlie Catlett and various others have put a platform out they call this the WAGO platform which is a whole set of smart city sensors that are already deployed now in a Bronzeville neighborhood as well as other locations around Chicago and the idea with this particular project is to figure out how we can leverage these smart city sensor networks specifically for utility applications so as one example these sensors include solar insulation sensors and we're looking to see if we can get a really granular sense of the potential for solar insulation and ultimately very granular prediction so that in the future we might be able to have a really good handle on what sort of output we're expecting from our DER resources in the region then we're also working with MIT on a project we call Building Level Energy Modeling Christoph Reinhart and his team have put together really interesting algorithms to very rapidly assess energy efficiency opportunities across an entire city and they have really creative ways of bringing in all kinds of public data as well as data that utility can provide and really do good assessments of energy efficiency opportunities that are really increasing in accuracy over time and particularly as we're able to add more data to these models so we think this can be really interesting for lead generation and helping our customers understand where they may be able to really benefit from energy efficiency retrofits and then finally we have a project with MIT and Stephen Lieb in his lab we call this one Autonomous DER Controllers in this case Professor Lieb and his students have developed a new kind of non-invasive load sensor and controller that could actually be connected outside of people's homes and what these what these sensors would do is actually sense the loads within each home and then the sensors would communicate with one another through a control mechanism would then be able to effectively decide when to turn certain loads on and off but do this all in an autonomous fashion that preserves privacy so what you could imagine is that if we deployed a couple of these sensor controllers across a system of houses on a particular feeder we can ensure that we only have a certain number of HVAC systems on at any given time and this would help us to meet our hosting capacity requirements while potentially keeping our customers more comfortable because instead of having to reduce their thermostats they could just be staggering the times at which they're running their HVAC systems and maintaining a certain temperature so I'll pause there and look forward to taking questions from folks I think we have a lot that's going on that's interesting and a lot that we're hoping to pull together within what we call our connected communities vision for our utilities thank you excellent Laura that's a wonderful presentation thanks for coming back I'm sorry we had some issues there there's an excellent job on your presentation and a great summary from my perspective how you're really applying digital technologies and trying to address real issues and how you're using the data from the customers you know your autonomous DER controllers is a very good example of innovation and research are happening in this project so we have I would say 15 minutes I want to give a minute for Omar to close out but now we have 15 minutes open for the questions we do have some questions on the chat I will go through that first and then we'll kind of open up the floor for other questions first I'll start with the question that was posed to all the panelists after this from Yang Meng from Stanford what role will AMI slash smart meter system play in the future of this customer centric world so you know and either of you could take the question let me this lyric will jump in real quick I did add a little bit of to onto the chat there to say you know clearly as we add in translational application we have a whole bunch of chargers are going to be added that is just another meter different form of that these are sensors that are out in and you know as we are thinking about how we communicate how we use those sensors much like Laura just demonstrated the autonomous DER controller is that eventually going to be built into the meter is that something that we want to consider I think those are plenty of there's lots of opportunities there to think about what can that meter do further than than just providing the data the the sensing that it has right now excellent thank you Larry you know John any perspectives yeah so we're just real quick the meter is going to play a significant role you'll pull data from that meter for both for optimization power quality but starting real soon as we roll out our smart meter program in Missouri we're going to offer four different new time of use plans for customers in Missouri allowing them to default into one plan but opt into other plans there'll be dynamic time of use plans and the goal there is as the adoption of DER increases you know at a macro level the time of use rates will evolve to dynamic pricing programs and that's going to be required so that you know instead of having to force curtail that you'll use pricing to incent and incertail customer usage you still want the ability to manage and control you know what's backfitting to that feeder potentially but utilizing the customer desire and the meter to control that excellent thank you John I completely agree with you I want to give a opportunity to Lara Lara do you have any perspective on this yeah yeah I think this is actually a really interesting question because I certainly agree that particularly in the near term smart meters are going to be a very important piece of the equation and a very important source of data but we do actually wonder sometimes how far in the future that might hold and I think it depends on the other kinds of sensors and the other kinds of controllers that we wind up deploying throughout businesses throughout homes and throughout our network so you could see a situation for example where if we're really starting to you know network all of our appliances and potentially even put specialized controllers within the house or other kinds of sensors within the house that you know integrate with other sorts of systems like security systems it may be that we have sufficient and different kinds of data coming from an array of sensors throughout the city throughout the home and throughout commercial businesses that we wind up actually relying less and less on the meter data itself I think you know there are some big questions around that and we have a pretty strong debate internally around you know will we ever try to seek to control a customer's coffee pot turning on and off and of course the answer to that is really not in part because our customers are going to want to start their coffee when they want to start the coffee but but also because we're really you know thinking about ultimately managing probably larger loads but I think it's an interesting question to consider is to really think about you know where is the level of control going to reside and to what extent are we going to be very granular in how customers interact with our electricity usage and how we interact with them and so you could see in some sense potentially a decreasing role for smart meters going forward depending on how the rest of that shapes up Excellent point Laura I mean not just about the control of you know how much control you need but what also needs to be controlled that's an important point related to that topic I think I have a question for all the panelists at a higher level you know everybody mentioned about smart technologies networks and communications and even data access cybersecurity etc are important aspects but to really integrate them into the utility you need to also create markets I think everyone said the same thing in terms of creating programs and markets that enable the flexibility or customer resources to play a very critical role in addressing grid reliability with the needs etc and we have a clearly seen in the work study or many other research studies that I have done in the past is you know having those both markets of dynamic pricing that John you just mentioned moving from Q and U to dynamic pricing eventually and then also having these smart consumer technologies play a very important role in seeing how you know how much flexibility can we get and how much reliable flexibility we can get because reliability and persistency plays a very critical role reliability from making sure as customers say they're going to do something you can rely on that right and persistency is you know every time you ask the customers to do that can they persistently provide that you know and within this the data plays a very key role in that whole decision-making process you know you're forecasting as well as real-time monitoring measurement verification etc so what value do you see you know evolving from this customer data that might help electric utility manage its grid more reliably and in a more resilient manner yeah I'll go ahead and jump in I mean I think that's a really interesting question and it's really important that we understand this and I think and I think the key point here is that we will come to understand what the potential is particularly for kind of demand side responsiveness in light of these kinds of time of use programs over time so obviously when we start our first pilot it's not going to be quite clear the answers to some of the questions you're asking about consistency and you know in total amount of response but I think as we move forward we're starting to learn more and more about the right level of aggregation about exactly how many systems are required in order to achieve the kind of reliability that we'll need from that side of the equation and the more data we get both in terms of time and in terms of number of participants the more clear it will be exactly to what extent we can rely on these kinds of services and I feel very optimistic that there'll be an extraordinarily robust and important piece of the system going forward wonderful anyone else I guess I would chime in with Laura and agree and I think I think we as utilities you know we have to be very sensitive to how we're operating a grid and thinking about reliability and affordability etc but I think we really need to shift our attention onto the customer and thinking about the customer experience and you know what are they they don't want the complication and you know you look at many of our tests and trials and the complexity of systems and you know how often do I have to reboot this thing how often do I have to talk to this thing customers are going to want you know things that are simple easy to operate I'll use a quick example of a tankless hot water tank that actually learned what I did for for seven days and then it performs on that basis so how are we putting those things into play to help us into the grid so customers going to want things that are much easier and yes that they know they're participating that they're effective they want the advice from you know their energy partners to think how can I transition we have groups that are coming to us from companies and saying we want to transition to this decarbonized world but I don't know how to do that for my house what do I need to do for my house and how can I do participate in this and so again I think we have to turn our attention to thinking about customers and their desires as much as what we've traditionally done on the grid excellent I got anything from you John yeah just briefly I think Laura and Larry did a good job answering it far better than I would I think about you know in the short term as you manage the grid and you look at localized load and resources I worry about the third parties that are going to come in and sell customers goodness on the backs of the utility and we focused on grid reliability and the traditional DMS and I worry that we lose sight of how quick retailers can work and put that edge computing out there and give solutions and opportunities to our customers who really don't care about the reliability the grid and to what affects them individually so I I think we have to be cognizant of what those disruptors are we don't have to control them we need to partner and understand those I think about you know edge computing and blockchain transactive energy right at the feeder I don't know what that looks like but that's a concern that we have to understand those capabilities the other thing you talked about data I think that the key thing in any application talked about ease of years is the reliability and accuracy if we provide solutions that don't work don't provide meaningful information or have bad data you're going to lose your customers your interest in whatever program you're working on we all understand there's a startup but you really need to strive for the credibility and reliability of that data timeliness is also a factor absolutely I appreciate that John I couldn't agree in the accuracy in the whole data integrity right used to be a data scientist much a long time ago I started that you know how much time it's really took to clean the data it severely underestimated in the industries so you know bad data garbage in garbage out right so we know that really appreciate that thank you we've got some excellent set of questions coming in from the attendees on the chat I don't believe we'll get time to go through everything but we'll try to do as many as possible this question is a two-part question to all the panelists this started from Jonathan Sandham the question is does the role of desegregation or submetering become more important into the future as we are looking at a lot more than just kilowatt hour in the future you know going beyond kilowatt hour does the desegregation submetering become important the second part of that is of the thought is more chronic and adding to it is will third-party offer these energy services enabled by submetering and how should the utility interface with these third parties and these energy services so it's a related question and one is the value of the submetering and aggregation itself and the second one is how do you enable those aggregations to third-party services so anybody want to take this question first this is Larry and I'll try a little bit of it and Laura and John probably to correct me as I think about those submetered services we know that it's going to change dramatically transportation electrification is a great example of that because now you've got a device that's moving around may not even be on your system it's going to somebody else's system and yet that customer is going to want to maybe have a flat rate for their electrical electric fueling I'll use that term I'm not quite sure what we want to call it just electric charging but but they're going to want to make it easy for wherever they're charging their their vehicle and so there's different services associated with that but I I would also say that we had an experience here in Oregon where we talked about transportation electrification and we call it make ready work that's the work from the what would be traditionally a typical meter today to what would be the charging stations and whether you've got fleet or it's going into apartment complex etc but that make ready work traditionally has been under national electric code instead of the national electric safety codes so that's an electrician versus a journey of alignment but yet we in Oregon are looking at well let's make it a qualified worker that can work on that for somebody and oh by the way can you the utility install that because the hurdle has been the charging companies would love to put chargers on but the affording of the wires and conduit etc to get to the charging station has not has been a real big barrier and so we're seeing that the utility can step into that space and provide that make ready much like we do align extension to a home then all of a sudden that that barrier goes away and so so the services I think are going to change over time and you know where the need is and and how we I guess push for the those services is going to be dependent as Laura mentioned with our regulators as well as what society is pushing for what customers really want excellent thank you Larry I know we you're almost like 929 I want to make sure I give a minute to Omar to wrap up this panel so we do have some great questions still unfortunately not able to get to it but what I'll do is ask a rapid fire to rapid fire questions you'll get 10 seconds so you could just say yes or no or just yes we are doing this so let me ask the question really quick you know Jesse Naomi asked a question any example a challenge that I've been solved through machine learning applications so you know we can talk with each one of you rapid fire no okay Laura I don't have a specific example right now but we're we're actually working pretty heavily with GE on a predict implementation and I think there are a couple of cases where we're likely to be able to leverage the machine learning in order to do some predictive maintenance which we're very excited about excellent thank you Larry yeah the predictive maintenance on the generation thus far but also now we're starting to see it from things like services connected or transformers right homes to the right transformers that sort of thing starting to see machine learning there excellent thank you one last question from Lynn Pitchard as an industry have you missed the boat on smart inverters John I don't think so I think it's evolving I do think smart inverters is probably one of the best changes in our industry the digital sign wave and the the efficiency that you want to drive in the grid I think it's it's coming and I think we need to embrace it even more if I understood the question right I think that's great thanks John Laura yeah I agree I know that we have some legacy systems out there but I remain hopeful that we'll see increase in deployment of marine corridors and ultimately some replacement of some of the existing systems because I think this is extraordinarily it's a valuable set of technologies that we're really going to want to leverage perfect thank you Larry slow start I agree with both Laura and John that technology in fact utilities were somewhat resistant in this process at first making sure we wanted to get safety protection all those things correct but I would also challenge us that we we didn't know that we needed 45 foot class two poles 100 years ago either we're going to learn as we go excellent great summary guys I think of what ladies and gentlemen I this has exceeded my expectation certainly in terms of knowledge and learnings but also in terms of the relevancy to this particular digital grid workshop that we collectively can get in crafting or research goals on new collaborative models et cetera so with this I really appreciate our you guys joining us it's been an ongoing experience and I'm glad to have you all in the panel you know and providing your insights really appreciate that thank you Omar back to you fantastic Rich thank you thank you to all the panelists and on behalf of our colleagues at Stanford bits and watts and every we appreciate everyone being on just a reminder we'll put up this slide here as we close we will have our European utility panel that's a session tomorrow at the same time followed by on Thursday our technology panel so once again we look forward to having you participate attend those sessions we again want to thank Larry Laura and John for your for your excellent presentations rich for for your moderation and everyone for your time thank you so much and we will be once we have the recording we will send out information to everyone that's attended on how you can access the webcast recording and a PDF of the presentations as well so with that we will adjourn the webcast thank you and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow bye bye thank you thank you great bye