 I do think that this panel is a great one to end with today. We heard just prior to this from a panel of individuals who were speaking about jobs and economic growth of these clean energy technologies, renewable energy and energy efficiency, and what's happening today in the market with jobs and economic growth. Our panel now will be speaking to us about what the future holds and where innovation is taking us in the clean energy sector. Where is technology headed? So we have a great set of speakers to share information, a very diverse group of individuals with a lot of background and expertise. I will introduce each of them individually prior to them speaking and let them give a more detailed biography of who they are and what they do when each of them speaks. So just as a reminder, I am Ruth McCormick. I'm with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, and I'm very honored to pinch hit today as moderator of this panel. Our first speaker is Alex Fitzsimmons, who is Senior Advisor to the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary at the US Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The mission of EERE is to create and sustain American leadership in the transition to a global clean energy economy. And I would just say how important the role of EERE is. And I note to our members, we work with the Department of Energy and we advocate for the Department of Energy to maintain and do the research that they have done in the past to continue this innovation in both applied research as well as the early stage research. But there's important roles in both. So with that, let me turn the time to Alex. Thank you, Ruth, for that introduction. Generally, the longer someone's title is, the less important they are. And mine was pretty long as I heard Ruth kept going and going. So it's like, ouch. But I'm Alex Fitzsimmons, the Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the US Department of Energy. I just wanna thank you all for being here, this late panel. I will try to keep this short because it's very hot and all of you who are still here are the real heroes in the room. So our office is, I think it's the coolest office in all of DOE. Because we work on the widest range of technologies. We have everything from wind, solar, biofuel, geothermal, hydro to advanced manufacturing, to building technologies. Glad there's none of my staff here to forget the other names of the programs. But there are 12 program offices in total. We have a $2.3 billion budget in fiscal year 18, about 900 employees. We're also the steward of the National Renewable Energy Lab, which is in Golden Colorado, which is a lot nicer in July than DC. So I encourage you all to get out there, if you can. And so today, it's a very broad topic we have to finish this day out. Where technology is headed. So I just want to talk about a couple of macro trends that we're looking at at DOE. And that is, I think we're in the middle of an energy production revolution. And we're on the precipice of an energy consumption revolution. So I'll talk about what I mean and how those are related. So I think as we all know here, the cost of various energy sources has declined dramatically in recent years. You look at the cost of wind and solar energy. Just last year, the DOE announced that the solar industry achieved its 2020 cost target of 6 cents per kilowatt hour for utility scale solar three years ahead of schedule. And that was an enormous achievement driven by a host of factors. A lot of which has to do with advances in technology that EERE helps support. Costs of wind energy have also declined. And so you've seen rising amounts of wind and solar on the grid, which is great. We've also seen oil natural gas prices decline precipitously over the last decade, where now the United States is the largest combined producer of oil, natural gas in the world. And we were a net energy exporter last year for the first time in decades. And we were one of only, I believe, four countries in the world to actually reduce our CO2 output last year. And that's because of a combination of the technological advances in renewable energy and in traditional sources like oil and natural gas. So these costs declines and this additional capacity that's come online has led to a more diverse electric grid. And this creates both opportunities and challenges. As we know, wind and solar have integration issues. They don't work 24 seven. So we have to create technology to better integrate renewables. And one of the biggest ways we're doing that within DOE and within EERE is with energy storage. And when most people think of energy storage, they look at grid scale batteries. And we do a lot of work in that across the department, really. RPE is one of the other offices in the department. They just came out with a long duration storage target. So we typically think of storing energy for four, eight hours. RPE is looking at potentially weeks or months worth of battery storage, which would be a true technological breakthrough. But EERE works on battery storage in the context of electric vehicles. Some other parts of the department work on battery storage in terms of supporting the grid. And but we're also looking at storage more holistically. We have a new initiative going beyond batteries. Thinking about what are the essential services that storage provides? And can that be provided in other ways in addition to grid scale batteries? And so we're excited about the opportunities there, because there's a lot of great technology in the building space, being able to more closely manage supply and demand, shift peaks around, which is going to get to the consumption part that I'll talk about in a second. But we're excited about that potential. So that's the production revolution that's led to declining costs, increasing capacity, and as well as technological challenges to solve around integration. The consumption revolution that I think we are on the precipice of is twofold. It's both increasing consumption and decreasing consumption. And there's a give and take between those forces. So obviously we have a lot of developing countries around the world that have rising middle classes in China and India and elsewhere. And this is a positive thing for the world, and they are using more energy. They're lifting millions of people out of poverty, and there's still a long way to go. India has 300 million people who don't have access to power. That's about the population of the United States. This is an enormous energy challenge, and so it's also an exciting opportunity. So we're pleased to see countries lifting themselves out of poverty and using energy as a means to do that. But at the same time, while we see increasing energy use in the developing world, we see flattening or declining energy consumption in the developed world. And that's due in large part to energy efficiency improvements. The last gentleman, I think he was a GW professor. I went to GW, but he mentioned the benefits of energy efficiency. And we agree with that. There have been tremendous gains in both the industrial side, so improving manufacturing productivity as well as consumer appliances. And the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy regulates about sets appliance standards for 60 or so categories of home appliances that we use every day, including the lights in this room. I have three minutes, so anyway. Dishwashers, microwaves, et cetera. So that's another opportunity. We've had a bifurcation of GDP growth and energy consumption in the developed world. And that's a good thing. We probably won't see that for a long time in the developing world, but we're working on it with new technology. And so these are issues that technology can help solve. And so what this has led to is on the consumption side, I think we are heading into a future with more dynamic load instead of passive load. And instead of just being passive consumers of energy flipping the lights on, we are entering an age where technology will enable us to interact with the grid, to manage our energy use more effectively. We all have Nest thermostats, but we're talking far beyond that, where the internet of things and the technology we have in our smartphones will empower us to manage our energy use and work with the utilities to do that. We're also looking at the commercial level, opportunities for buildings to help integrate renewables by installing advanced controls and sensors that allow them to respond to grid conditions in real time. It's something called Transactive Controls that some of our national labs are working on. So this is all exciting technology that I think over the long term will change the paradigm and change the fundamental relationship between energy production and consumption. And so I just want to leave you with a final thought. I'm optimistic and both humble, optimistic and humble about the future because I think few people anticipated the growth that we would see in oil and natural gas. Few people saw, envisioned how low oil and natural gas prices would be and that's had a variety of implications. At the same time, a lot of people didn't predict that wind and solar technology costs would decline as rapidly as they have. And these are all positive trends. It's why the administration supports an all of the above portfolio approach to developing energy technology. It's why we work with organizations like BCSE and other stakeholders to gather as much input, leave no stone unturned, pursue all available technologies at our disposal. It's why I am optimistic and grateful for the job that I have helping to lead this important office and working with our national labs and our partners on the hill. And I'll stop stumping now and just say that I'm grateful for the opportunity that you've all given me here. I'm grateful that you stuck it out all day to sit here in this panel and I look forward to your questions. Thank you. The Department of Energy truly has helped to bring about the market dynamism that we're seeing in the clean energy sector and it's really been the result of the bipartisan consensus around the research that's done both early stage and applied research for these technologies. Our next speaker has a very extensive background in both physics and electrical engineering, both as an academic and as a researcher. So I think he's very well suited to help us understand what lies ahead in the innovation world and what we might be seeing in the energy sector. Dr. Xing Wu Wang is a professor of electrical engineering at Alfred University in Western New York and with that I will turn the time to Dr. Wang. Thank you very much. So I will be talking about two aspects of the future technology for clean energy. One is on the materials side, the other is on power grid side. So those two extremes will tie our needs for the future technologies in a more bright way. First, everything starts with materials. Second, we are all using the power grid system as of today. For those of us who work from very cool hallway into somewhat hot conference room, we are experiencing the lack of future technologies. So I will be using three buzzwords to tie those two extremes together. Nano, micro and macro. Nano on the materials side, the research is very exciting. Today if we look at the solar panel in the residential and solar farm, those were the technologies developed that many years ago and DOE can certify what I'm saying. Because their scientists, along with the Bell Lab scientists, they worked on the silicon-based technologies. And efficiency based on silicon technologies in principle should be very high. But today the next generation of the provost guy based solar cells actually has exceeded the silicon-based efficiency. So what does that say? That tells us one thing, we can never stop doing research at nano level. Why? If you look at nature, the nature is building the most efficiency, well, many million years of evolution or adaptation to get to us here. So how would we transfer the technology from the university, DOE labs, other places to the innovation passageway to make it into more feasible? So at that level we say, possibly nature can teach us multi-layer structure. If you look at the tree leaves outside, especially in DC, they are so great, it would be very efficient in harvesting solar energy, right? Because solar comes from UV all the way to the infrared. How come we don't have multi-layer harvester at the commercial level for the future? Namely, do we have a layer harvesting UV all the way down the bottom to harvest the infrared? So we are really in need of the innovation. Second, what's the nano grid? Nano grid could be this room, could be this building. What this says is we have sun, we have wind, or we even potentially have biomass. And how would we use all the available resources with economical scale of the innovation? So that really requires a huge challenge. On the micro side, most of our cell phones are based on micro electronics, so that needs very little explanation. On the grid side, micro grid essentially is making resilient community for village, for small cities. That's why they have enough resources to sustain their operation in an island format without an external power grid supply for a duration. Third, macro. What is macro for us? For power grid, many people have talked about continent power grid at macro. So if we look at the northern part, hydro from Canada, if we look at the southern part of the continent, the biomass, the king grass, one of the major US fabric or the textile company has a full megawatt biomass power generation in South America. So the question is, is this possible to have us forming a macro grid? You can move the electric power from one side to the other, wherever it may be in need. So that tells us there's a need for research at the cloud-based computing. Why? Because you have to have the harvesting of the power load at different local. For New York State, half of the electricity is consumed in New York City area. But all the wind currently is being planned in the southern tier in the upstate New York. So how are you going to use the cloud-based computing to move the electricity through the existing infrastructure or future infrastructure to do it very smartly, to do it very efficiently so you have the energy movement without any power loss? So now the question is, why we have to be here? I can do it somewhere else. No, we have to be here because this is where the policy is made. Why is the energy policy so important? Because it has to do with domestic politics. It has to do with international politics. For those of us, if we remember the energy crisis when Jimmy Carter was president, do we really want to stand in the gas station without any gasoline? To me, it's a policy issue. To us, it is a policy issue. Now the question is, where do we have the jobs? How can we create more jobs domestically? To me, it's education. It was so intriguing walking through the hallway. Education and workforce actually has no schedule for their committee. But yet the foreign affairs committee has everything scheduled every single time. Why? It is a policy issue because we never put the education to the forefront. Why? Because we always assume that education can be done anywhere cheaply, economically. Yes, but it has to be very much policy driven. So I'll give you an example. How do we create the domestically educated labor force which will be useful for the electoral power grid? I don't want to scare anybody. I can tell you, if you talk to utilities, they will tell you there is a lack of the working force. Because there is a huge retirement wave coming up. And we need more power engineers who are familiar with the computer communication, electronic communication and the control to move the electricity in a very secure manner without being worried about the hacking. Today we did not see much of the hacking. I can very much tell you. That's mainly because some of the power grid relays are in the 1950s. If not in 1930s technology, nobody can hack into it. Try to hack the relay which is almost like pulling a huge switch gear by your hand. You think anybody who has internet access to your network can do that? No. But that does not mean we cannot invent the future power grid which is based on the future technology. So to me the DOE contribution is very important. And also to educate the future students will be very important. Thank you. Thank you Dr. Wang. I can tell you that from our organization's perspective whenever we talk about needed investments and work on infrastructure workforce development which has a component obviously with education is a very important one for many of our utility members. It's like a very top priority. Our final speaker on this panel is David Hart who is a senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation which is an independent, nonpartisan research and educational institute focusing on the intersection of technology, technological innovation and public policy. Another really important area of work. As someone who works with members of Congress all the time, I'm always impressed by the AAAS fellows who are the very bright scientists who come work in public policy and find that their contribution is really, I see a smile. Maybe we have a AAAS fellow over here. I always like working with the fellows so thank you. David. Great. Thanks. I always thought the last slot before lunch was the worst speaking slot but a little competition today being the last speaker on a long program. So thank you all for sticking around. I do have a think tank hat. I'm the senior fellow in the Clean Energy Innovation Area at ITIF. I also teach at the Policy School at George Mason University and I thought I would just sort of wrap up today with a brief pep talk because I think I'll start being professorial and I'll save the marketing stuff for the end so I'll talk a little bit about what we do at ITIF at the very end. But I thought I'd start with a big question. So the big question for this panel is where is technology headed? And of course if I knew the answer to that I would be on my own private island somewhere not teaching for a policy school. That's because innovation is fundamentally unpredictable. It involves risk and risk means you can lose your money. The cost can beat you to the punch. And sometimes fortunes are lost as well as won. And there's at least two dimensions to this. One is what I call the game with nature, what can be done and at what cost this involves physics, biology, chemistry, all the stuff that the basic research side of DOE among other supports. And then there's the kind of game with society. What do people want? What are your competitors doing? So this is economics. This is sociology. This is also politics and policy. And so what people do in this building and in other buildings around Washington DC makes a big difference in what kinds of technologies prove to be viable. So part of it has to do with what we can discover about that game with nature. That's where basic research funding comes in, what kinds of projects get funded, what kinds of teams get funded, what kinds of relationships are made in that process. And then also the government has a role as the umpire in the so-called game with society and sometimes it's a player as well. So government shapes the terms of competition, shapes a lot of the interactions among private players. So federal government makes a big difference, but it doesn't call all the shots. Obviously nature has its say. Customers have their say. And Alex talked about the kind of beginning of a revolution in consumption, which I think is very real. And the rest of the world has a lot to say as well. Both our federal system in the U.S. states are doing lots of things that affect energy innovation, Europe and Japan, but also now China and India are big players. So what should the federal government be trying to do here? I think the fundamental job is to create more and more low-carbon and no-carbon energy technology options. So more and more applications and to build this robust pipeline of opportunities for clean energy because we don't know exactly what's going to work once it gets out there in society into the world. And so the job of the government is to create those opportunities. Now what does that mean in practice? It does involve funding basic research at universities and national labs as a professor, of course, for more basic research funding. But that's not enough. It's important for those researchers to be led to topics that are useful. So in literature we call this use-inspired basic research. And I think of this very generally at the federal level of creating demand pull. How do we connect our researchers up with the users who downstream are going to use their ideas? And there have been a number of innovative ideas in this area recently, building public-private partnerships, the Energy I-Corps, which is a way that national labs folks can get out and try to become entrepreneurs. So anything that inspires this use-inspired basic research. But I also think the federal government has a role to mature technologies, prototyping and proof of concept. So ARPA-E, this is kind of ARPA-E's territory, turning ideas into actual artifacts that work. I also think the federal role is important in demonstration. Now this varies from technology to technology, but there are definitely technologies in the EERE area that need federal support to be demonstrated effectively, whether it's biofuels, whether it's advanced renewables. And also the federal government has a role to play in early adoption. So early adopters may adopt expensive technologies, but it helps to give them something of a price break, whether it's through tax incentives or whether it's through federal procurement. And then finally, there's the role managing entrepreneurship and competition, the role of federal regulators like FERC, which has fostered innovation. So for instance, the Energy Storage Market really got its start because of FERC initiatives and then implemented by the PJM Regional Transmission Organization. So all this stuff is important and why the reason is that we don't have the technology options that we need yet to get to our 80% goal or less as we move on in this century, right? There is a myth out there, I think, that we have all the technology we need. All we need to do is deploy and I think that that's wrong and we've got to keep building this pipeline and maturing these technologies. So that's what our program is all about. We're trying to build the evidence space to support these policies and helping to explain it both inside the Beltway and also outside it. We've got some work on federal appropriations. We have a table over here if you want to pick up our reports or go to our website. We're thinking about the DOE structure and the U.S. government structure in general to support energy innovation. We're thinking about international trade and competitiveness, so I just finished a paper on energy storage and some of the risks moving forward. In that area, we've written reports on RPE recently on the Clean Energy Manufacturing Program and I'm just finishing up a paper very generally on the theme of regulation and innovation. So look forward to hearing your questions. Happy to connect with you individually and pick up our stuff over here. Thanks. So we do have a few minutes for questions if there are any. I know you've been here for a long time, but I want to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to finish out this really great panel and get the questions that you have answered. Are there any in the audience? Yes. Well, it actually is my cheat sheet. So DC is one of the possibilities. So if you look at the fundamental consumption of DC, your cell phone consumes DC, your computer consumes DC. In principle, you don't need AC to plug in, right? Unless you want to charge it with AC power. If you have a smart house or if you have the tiny house, you don't need a DC grid. If you go to Navy, most of the military boats are actually DC-based system. And if you look at the transmission approaches, actually DC is not bad. So there are a few sections of DC transmission lines. In Canada, in Texas, or in other continents. So to us, again, it's a policy issue. If the policymaker upon the Department of Energy recommendation sees that this actually is an opportunity. If you look at the DC experiment done by Brookhaven National Lab, even with superconducting transmission wires, it's very much in advantages. And I'm glad you asked the question. Anybody else with an answer to that question? I have been aware of it, so I can't speak to it the way Dr. Wang can. Sounds cool to me. But did that answer your question? Transmission siting is an issue that involves local, state, and federal government, as well as private capital. And in fact, there's a group over here, Wires, that can probably give you chapter and verse on this. Exactly what it takes. I don't know that the investment appetite is there yet for a full-scale HVDC system. I do think if you look at the energy models, like the 80% models, a lot of them envision that as the least cost way to get there. But my impression is that the utilities aren't ready to build this yet. And there needs to be further kind of development of political momentum. I don't know whether others have a different view, but that's my impression. If you look at the future of the Mars, the moons, I don't want to say colony, but human activities, if you really build your power system based on DC using the clean energy on those places, actually it's much more advantageous. And in fact, if you look at the manufacturing, 3D printing can be just based on DC power. It did not have to be based on AC power as well. Okay, are there any final questions before we have to close? Okay, one more question. I mean, I think policymakers have a role no matter what. They're constructing the environment in which these investment decisions get made. It seems to me the fundamental goal is to have some kind of policy stability, and that's difficult for our country given its electoral system. So I'm not sure it's going to be feasible to avoid stranded assets. I would encourage investors to go in with their eyes open and they're probably factoring in some of these policy risks. But I think it's a challenge and my hunch is we are going to have some stranded assets or else we're not going to get to where we need to go. So if you look at the regulation for the telephone, some of us still remember the one company for telephone, then it became Papa Bell, Mama Bell, Baby Bell, Nobel, and so on and so forth. So if you look at the electrical power grid system, what we have today is relatively old business model. And each independent system operator is still operating under regulation so many years ago. So if the policy makers can think through the disruptive technology into the electrical power utility system, it would be very much the contribution to the mankind, not only the people in this country. Why? Because if you look at all the disruptive technologies for microgrid, nanogrid, islanding, they have tendency to move towards deregulation. Not the deregulation we're talking about here, the deregulation for next level. And most importantly, if you think about electrical vehicle, even electrical bus can be part of the integrated power system with a community-based power. If you give the incentive to the venture capitalist, to the innovators, to the communities, rather than having each state or some government entity controlling 80% of whatever there is. So I would say it's not true deregulation. I would think the policy maker should look into more deregulation and that actually is going to make the product much more affordable. Today, most of the public service commission is worried about increasing one cent per kilowatt hour. But what we see based on the number you just provided, we can see a half reduction based on 10 cents per kilowatt hour. If that's indeed the data we can show. So there are lots of disruptive technologies, economical models, policy issues, which should be debated. Unfortunately, utility is a giant and this is a monster. I would say look at telephone. Telephone companies only had one and we possibly have seven different regions. I would think we can do better. Thank you. We're going to have to close it there. But I would just say that we've been very enriched today by the experts. I think one of the most positive things about being up here on Capitol Hill is the opportunity to learn from experts in the field regardless of what the topic is. And I really feel like we have experienced that today and I'd like to thank our experts today for participating. Thank you.