 Good afternoon. My name is Meg Ray, I'm a Science and Technology Librarian here at Portland Movement Library and I'm here to welcome you to Portland Sustainability Series. We meet here every 4th Wednesday of the month at 5.30 for a presentation and conversation about various sustainability related topics in our community. And we're very fortunate because this series is actually a partnership between the library and Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative, which is a fantastic organization that assists work in Cumberland County Conservation Organizations to acquire, manage, and steward land in our communities. So I'm going to turn the mic over to Jess, who is the Executive Director and she will introduce today's speaker. Jessica, I'm here with the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative and our organization works with 21 conservation organizations in Southern Maine and we really think together about how to increase all of our impact through joint programming and building partnerships and connections to our community. And this is a wonderful example of the Sustainability Series. I have to practice that word I think. With the library it's a perfect partnership and it's been, now, August will be our 12th event we've had on every single month since August of 2016 and it's really a fantastic series. Tonight we're very fortunate to have our speaker, Lawrence Mott, who has an incredible experience working in the renewable energy field for over 30 years. So it has a breadth of experiences and travels all over the world. I live next door to him on Peaks Island so I see him come and get out from all the various places and it's very exciting and we're really fortunate. So thank you Lawrence and thank all of you for coming today. Thank you both. It's fun to be at the library in this facility and I see we've got a super small crowd so dash in, interrupt, ask questions because we've got an opportunity to be interactive. A couple quick questions. Everybody local? What's, are you coming from afar? Been here long? Give me a few things. Portland. All right. Good. So it's a local effort and any interesting projects from this young man you've been thinking about renewable energy you want me to hit on? All right. I'm going to go fast and a slow call out of a point is not there. I make it a habit to try to give some background to where I'm coming from my perspective as a speaker and engineering and business degree spend a lot of time in the industry as just mentioned American Wind Energy Association. I spent 30 some years in Vermont, chairman of a trade group, Renewable Energy Vermont focused on promoting renewable energy. So from my basis of building wind turbine as a college project I've always gone forth that the idea is we need to bring money in, classic economics and build renewable energy for all of its value and that it should make sense on a pure economic basis. So that's been my life work in industry right in the thick of it through all these various companies and through those efforts. I if you wanted to classify even though you can have a perspective of some politics because this is just Vermont. That is a normal scene in Vermont with Senator Welch, Sanders and Patrick Leahy. It is as I say probably socially liberal but very fiscally conservative and I'm bringing this up because people consider renewable energy, they talk about tax credits, subsidies and other things and I really want to dispel some of the notions of why renewable energy is absolute grounded basic economics of why we should be doing it. Few announcements remember energy efficiency first. Don't go running after generation, start where you should at the beginning. We get lost in this sometimes. People think about new generation, new ideas. We really want to think about it. I really like Aymarie Levin's comment. Notice we get so wrapped up in technology or a specific type of refrigerator. Well in northern Maine your most effective might actually be going back to an ice house and that's still going to keep your beer cold. So let's think about what you want. An announcement just because we do get in our new polarized political world, people get into scare tactics. So I'd like to, I bring this out. We've got lots of energy and I think the points there are pretty clear on where the trouble is. A little bit about the company I work for and an example of the topic tonight of what's going on in our industry. My company that I've been working with for the last seven years here in Portland has now been fully acquired by Wood Group and Wood Group is a five billion dollar Scottish oil services company and I think they have 96 offices worldwide. So here we are as a small renewable energy technical advisory group and now we've finally been fully acquired by a 35,000 employee group. So the Wood Group has all these possibilities of pipeline services, operations and maintenance, industrial services, the whole kit and this is what's going on in the renewable energy industry right now. It's hit the money, it's hit the big business and so big businesses are coming in and looking for the companies that they feel they can make money from, that they can grow and they can bring into there. Clearly an oil company right now suffering publicly traded with stock price volatility based on what a barrel of oil is and what the politics of OPIC or other issues. They're very excited about renewable energy because they see the growth, they see the stability. I'll tell you in about five or six years if it's going to work or not. So now just following on that point is here's a massive five billion dollar company and we live under specialized technical solutions in the clean energy group and of course when the marketers said we're going to be called Wood Group clean energy I kind of wondered well what do you call the rest of the company? I'm going to keep I think still with Skur Energy, Skur is a Scottish firm so my company based in Glasgow with our 320 people around the world. Our focus is being an independent engineer so we're purely an engineering firm and we focus on providing advice in the renewable energy field. We spend most of our time providing technical advisory to the financial community so a classic example is our customer is a equity investor on Park Avenue in New York City who wants to build a $400 million wind farm in Texas. They come to us to make sure that all the contracts with the wind turbine supplier, the soil conditions, power purchase agreements all the pieces of this puzzle are in order and the right deal and they move forward. So that's our work as engineers working within the financial community. We spent a lot of time trying to get answers to questions. As you can imagine in the renewable energy field our fuel is the natural resource whether it's the sun or the wind. So we have developed various tools in order to get a better idea of the energy resource. In the case of wind power the energy coming out of a wind turbine is a cubic function of the resource. So just a tiny change in the actual wind speed is a cubic change in the actual energy output. So a lot of the wind farms we work on might be generating $25,000 of electricity per hour in value. So you can imagine a small change in that if you could get it to $29,000 an hour or in the case of operations and maintenance if that machine, that wind farm is offline for a day you can the investors get a little nervous. We do a lot of work in offshore wind power. We have a control center is a remote operation center to monitor all these projects to keep them on track. There's our offices around the world and we're lucky enough to have one of them in Portland, Maine. And now under our new wood group we have offices even farther afield. So let's talk about tonight. I want to hit on some electric generation of wind solar really hitting on costs. What's going on around the world? Storage is a big topic. I have a feeling people are interested in. So let's move through those. I use this graph often because it helps give an understanding. So the two things you're looking at, two accesses. First of all you're looking at the technology stage. Is it embryonic on how well developed? You can see that large hydro nuclear, this has been around for a long time. This is a mature and actually in the case of nuclear is an aging technology. You're not seeing a lot of new installations in this area. The next access is where do we get our electricity generation from primarily in Canada, United States, Mexico? Well this is where you're getting the bulk of your energy. You're not getting much from these new technologies. So the king of the heap right now in our country is natural gas. It's the cheapest. It's the most flexible. It's cheap to build. It's very popular. It's like a drug. And we currently in this country have the cheapest natural gas in the world by far. And with the shale gas and fracking it's just continued to keep the price down low. So everyone is going towards the ability to build a cheap natural gas plant. I'm going to touch on some of these other things through. But I want you to just keep in mind this is the big base load power. We really don't generate electricity with oil anymore. The only point is really interesting because it's right next door. If you go look out on Cousins Island, that actually is an oil fired steam plant that's used for peaking. So it comes on and may run for five hours on a cold winter day and then shut down. Any questions on that? Just quickly. Terminology, I'll use kilowatt, megawatt, a lot of the big projects we speak of in megawatts to understand the size. To just give you some context, a typical house around here in Maine might be using at any time about one kilowatt and we might have a peak when a pump's on and a stove's on and a bunch of other things at two or three kilowatts or you have a hot tub or something. Now you add time. So that means it's actually energy. So now we look at our bill kilowatt hours and how many we use and what we have to pay for. This is the installed capacity. That plan on Cousins Island is about 600 megawatts, and a big wind turbine we'll see might be three megawatts. Capacity factor, that's a measure of if you had 100% capacity factor, that would mean that the machine was running 100% of the time all day long. So if your car, you had running 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, tearing down the highway, that would be 100%. And that's an important thing to think about. To use your car example, you probably only use, have a capacity factor of your car of probably 10% if you're a busy driver, maybe even less. If you own an asset in the case of a generation plant, what do you want? You want to make sure that that's running as much as possible. Availability, that's simply saying is it green light go, it's not broken, it's ready to go. I emphasize some of the things because the fossil fuel generation industry, the conventional fuels versus renewable, they like to point fingers and say renewable energy is intermittent, doesn't work, you can't integrate it. And I want to just again hit on some of these points of being intermittent. We measure our two resources. We talk about the annual average wind speed and sun hours. So to give you an example, here we have sun hours resources about three. Sun hours in New Mexico is about eight. Germany is about 3.1. So let's talk about wind power a little bit. This is a project out in Utah. Those are 100 meter towers. So 100 meters from the ground of the turbine and the rotors tip to tip are 100 meters. Typical wind turbine. Pretty obvious. That's why it's really great because they're simple. Rotor, generator, there's a disc brake just like your car to stop it and you can also pitch the blades just like an airplane in order to change the power characteristics. And then at the bottom of the machine nowadays you have power converters and burders and all the pieces to convert it to a stable electricity. I'm going to move through. I don't expect there's no quizzes. But if you're interested, I'm glad to hit on this at the end of the talk. But we are very interested, as I said, in the power of the wind and what you are, be able to extract from that air, which is kinetic energy passing through the rotor plane. So this is just like a big barn door when the blades are rotating. And that's what is pushing through the rotor and you're capturing it. Ideally you'd have a really big rotor and you'd capture as much of that wind as possible, which would give you more energy. But then where we live, if you've got a hurricane or a storm, then you're going to have to design that wind turbine to stand up in those storm conditions. So we have a lot of different classes of wind turbines depending on where you put them. We put a wind turbine on the south pole in Antarctica, because in that case the difficulties are A, the temperature, negative 100 degrees, but the other one is really great in that the highest wind speed ever recorded there is about 25 miles an hour. So you could put a very big rotor there and not worry about it blowing over. And it was also an ice foundation. So we excavated, cut, dug out, and put a metal foundation in and then used some heat and then we refroze it, because it's always frozen. And then you had an ice foundation, so you used local material. Just to hit on some of this, this is the worldwide energy resource in the case of wind. And the darker is the windier resource. We talk about the roaring 40s and the 40s latitudes, any sailors here, and all the winds and waves there. And then some more here and then you can see it's all white in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Solar. This is just on the western side of Denali in Alaska. It's a small village of about 30 people. It's one of my colleagues kneeling with the local, innovative kids there. And they were running diesel generators. So solar is a wonderful opportunity in that they could shut the generators off basically in the end of April with the sun in Alaska, those northern latitudes, and basically run on solar all the way through until end of October. Photovoltaics, a good example of why we have government agencies such as NASA and DOE that work on technology in the 1950s for space exploration in that case and brings a useful technology that we use every day now and can continue to profit from. Simply put, a semiconductor material which has different ion properties, positive and negative. When you put the sunlight and get the photons of the sunlight on it, you'll get some motion and it basically pushes electrons off and you can start a circuit so that the circuit flows plus towards minus and in around and you can get a direct current, DC current. So photovoltaic panels generate DC current and then we can just put masses of them together and we can build a power plant. I talked about resource, just an interesting fact of the concentration of solar from our sun in our country and what you could do to provide power in the country. So I wanted to hit on some costs and the takeaway from this graph, I'm going to have about four or five slides here. Again, feel free to dig in, ask questions. The point is where they're going. Solar and wind, all we do is in this very short time period continually watch the cost of this generation go down. So in this graph, this is focused on utility scale, not a few solar panels on your garage, but you can look at numbers here in a case of rooftop. So we're now approaching 2015 and this has gone down a little bit more. This is dollars per megawatt hour. So if you converted that to cents, because I think most of us think about how many cents per kilowatt hour is your electricity that you pay for. CMP right now is what about 12 cents, 15 cents. So this generation, this wholesale generation cost is saying it's 5.8 to 7 cents for this generator at their wholesale big project can generate in a sunny region. So some of the assumptions here is going to be back to that previous slide in the southwest where you've got a lot of sun. So in Maine, you're probably going to be up closer to 70 to 80 or 89 cents somewhere in there. We can talk further on some of the other slides on how do you get the basis of that. And I have to continue to emphasize this is for a big, massive project that might be 50, 100 megawatts in size in a desert application. Residential wise, I'd say right now we're probably in Maine on a side of a barn. We're probably somewhere in the range of this number, around 19 cents. So we're not far off. The idea is the word grid parity. When does solar in this case become the same as the cost you'd buy for the utility? So we are at 19 cents and you're paying retail 15. We're getting close. So a little bit more on that. This is an updated graph. This one is 2016-17. Lazard is the entity I meant to reference to European entity. A lot of the other graphs I have here from Bloomberg. So there's your, it's hard to read. I'm not sure how easy it is to read from there, but your solar PV residential. Notice this is the 13, 8 cents to 22 cents. And you can come down and look around at the various things. I think what's important is my point on, right here is the bottom one. Combined cycle gas. My point on fracking and this over push. Look where their numbers are. So that's 4.8 cents to 7.8 cents on life cycle costs. So this is a life cycle cost. In this basis is all in what are the interest costs, capital costs, operating costs, and pick a lifetime. Let's say 20 years. And what would be your overall cost on that basis. So the big frustration with President Trump is that coal by classic market economics is really not the cheapest. And so we've had, if you look at wind. Here's wind. Here's natural gas. Here's some of these others. And you look at the mining side costs, the externalities of mining and storing coal and other concerns about, you remember the dam of ash let loose and went into that river two or three years ago. And the fact that it's really not such a great deal. So this is pure market economics. No politics involved. That's why coal is not doing well. It has nothing about the renewable energy business picking on coal or saying that they shouldn't be in business. They're just simply not competitive. And that's the same goes for nuclear. I want to touch on a few of those points later. I have a question. The gas combined cycle is the gas peaking category not using combined cycle technology? It usually does. Why are costs so much higher? Because it's a classic case of the business model. So you are paying to have that plant sit there on standby and do nothing in reserve capacity. And it's possible in some cases that you'll have to see the natural gas reciprocating depending on where in the world you are. Whether it's diesel engine or standard reciprocating engine you may have that also. So just to kind of finish out the point of this graph is emphasizing again, these big lines are showing that the actual cost of the technology, life cycle cost of energy continuing to come down and these bars are showing what's being installed. So this is gigawatts. So now we've gone from kilowatts to megawatts to gigawatts and we see this continued installation of cumulative the dark blue is onshore wind and utility PV and then the commercial PV when a lot of home depot United parcel these folks Walmart are putting photo takes on their roof. That's the commercial industrial. And then the next one of course would be residential. So here's the proof in the numbers of the market responding to the value. And you can see similar to those other numbers were in this five to 10 cent range and then higher on these solar. I had a question about the previous slide actually. He puts you're showing that wind up. Do you have any fact that they are intermittent and really have to be backed up at times by something like gas taking? Exactly. So perfect question. So of course this graph is simple. So this is simply stating equally across every technology all its capital operating cost, cost of money and therefore that's its generation cost. So then your point is if you want to have stable power then do you need to add a firming might be the term source to this intermittent resource and based on those two together should be your blended price. I believe is your point which is a good one. And I would say the answer is yes that's practical in the trading and our current capitalist system. We don't do that. It's everybody for everybody. We have an unregulated for the current capitalist system. We don't do that. We don't do that. We have an unregulated for the most part utility sector. So what happens is there's an operator who's operating ISO New England you might have heard. So they're a quasi government entity and they're in charge of ensuring that the transmission system and our whole distribution network is operated safely and no one's left in the cold. And so they are running if I may the dials to say what's the wind output? What's the solar output? How many air conditioners are going to get turned on at one o'clock in the afternoon and what resources and they're just going to pick and choose the cheapest resource and hope at the end of the day that their blended portfolio is going to be low cost and reliable. I had a great experience two weeks ago I was in Curacao which is in the down in the Antilles near in Venezuela in the Caribbean commissioning a wind farm. So that island is a big fairly big island. They have 160 megawatts installed capacity of big oil fired and diesel plants. There's also an oil refinery that takes a lot of Venezuelan oil and refines it and ships it to Europe along with beautiful beaches. There are now four wind farms on the island. We just commissioned a fourth there and I talked to the utility engineer as we were setting up what I just referred to as all the operator controls so that that utility operator could shut the wind farm down or curtail it back it down and other things and he says oh no we consider the wind farm base load power we just run it full bore all the time we don't touch it. Now in the case of Curacao you know these things you have the trade winds and they're very predictable. They know exactly that around four in the afternoon that winds going to come up and it's going to stay right through 10 11 o'clock at night and then it's going to come back down again and they're very comfortable with relying on that so they call it base load power and they're not worried about having spinning reserves to make up for it. So while I concur with your point A we don't deal with it in our current regulatory market and B we're finding more and more of the adaptations in the case of wind power we're putting bigger rotors on we're getting better capacity factor and operators are getting very accustomed to what the characteristics are and we're getting more and more penetration we use the word of renewable energy into the grid and you're just going to see more of it especially with the advent of storage which to your point would be another cost you want to consider. Little known fact is that the demand people turning their light switches on and off in coffee pots varies much more than typical outputs of a whole conglomerate of wind farms and solar plants. So to the operators they're finding the demand going up and down more than the generation the intermittent renewable source. I think this is an interesting graph that was put together on a energy plan that Vermont put together from a consultancy down in Massachusetts this was done probably this is a while ago it's a date yeah 2009. So the whole point was what I want you to take away is the factor of development risk. So if you're a developer and you want to build a project and you're going to build a nuclear plant the likelihood that you're actually going to get all of your permits everything done and have a commercial plant you can imagine that's where your score here and even in a very difficult state like Vermont because Vermont has a lot of anti-wind people you're still have quite a bit lower risk and then you can see that this is out of date now this actually would change these graphs would go like this but it just gives you some idea of a consideration which is nuclear is the only technology right now in the United States that is able to secure a United States federal loan guarantee because it's so high risk we in the renewable energy business call them spoiled brats because we if we develop and we lose we lose but if they develop the government will stand behind them and bail them out so it's not fair economics on that point. Why is that? Good lobbying remember it's all politics we're going to hit more on politics but another unknown point the oil industry okay let's talk about taxes keep it simple so the renewable energy business focus on wind and solar has what's called investment tax credit some of you may have put solar panels on your roof and you've used a federal tax credit so right on your tax forms if you says did you install a renewable energy facility on your house this year and you can get a 30% tax credit so simply put instead of sending that money to Uncle Sam if you show proof that you bought a renewable energy system you can actually put that same money and prove to the government you put it into a renewable energy system i.e. the installer sends a note everything set so that is a subsidy clear and free wind also has a production tax credit but it's only based on production so if your wind farm doesn't produce you don't get a tax credit and I call that pretty fair it says you've got to work or else you don't get your deal the oil business and the gas business oh let me finish the renewable solar and wind those are temporary they get voted on and they've lasted from two years to now four years and now they're sunsetting so they're done the wind tax credit will end three more years 2020 and it's over the solar one and by the way the wind one is dropping down every year the solar one continues for four years and then it stops so hurry up if you're going to do your solar panels on your roof you've got four years get it done federal level so to my point oil and gas they've written those into our laws permanently they don't get voted on they're buried in the legislation that same type of tax credit exists for oil and gas but we don't hear about it because it's not voted on it's not in the media it's not out there but it's been going on since the 19 it was part of the 1950s coming back to really push oil exploration and the whole notion of the powerful United States economic engine and they wanted to induce more investment in that sector we in the renewable energy business like to say we're glad to participate on a level playing field we will give up our production tax credit no problem come take it away and we will compete just straight deal but the oil and gas industry won't accept our challenge before I go I've been throwing around a lot of numbers so right now in Texas is the largest United States state of wind activity big wind farms being built there and those wind farms are coming out at three and a half cents so that number that I quoted there is for real these are projects that we've been involved with that they're generating on the bus bar at the end of that substation these are big projects to 300 megawatts so they could you know power the whole two cities of Portland on one of these farms and they are at under natural gas prices we do have to pay transmission costs which might add a penny to transmit that electricity over the lines to get there but this is as I say real business another interesting fact is with solar it's about three times and when four times the number of employees per installed megawatt compared to a gas plant so instead of spending that money on a lot of the fuel you are actually hiring regular people and the typical operator is kind of a auto mechanic that you've trained to be a technician so you are in my view spending money hiring people rather than sending it to a very consolidated group in the gas business now I agree gas also employs people but it's much more concentrated and hired dispersing that money compared to a broader array of jobs alright let's shift a little bit Latin South America this is the new hot market so my company has an office in Chile in Rio and Mexico and these this area is in quite a ways shall we say behind our country US please know United States has been a real leader in renewable energy we've got a lot of firsts we're being absolutely left behind and in the dirt but we have been very much of a leader both on technology and installation and kudos to Governor George Bush in some really innovative policies in Texas that put forth so much wind power and now solar power in that state and his administration also passed a push for a significant amount of 20 percent of our energy in the whole country from wind and solar power that he set as a goal through that the Bush administration George Bush so in Latin America I think just the takeaway is their actual 20 gigawatts and look what they're trying to forecast to install so you can look at some of the increased percentage of the current install capacity in to 2020 so this is obviously why we're down there and why so much activity especially in Chile, Panama, Mexico, Argentina Argentina is now become stable enough people are willing to invest in it it's gotten its markets back together just that's really pretty new news in the last year and a half Brazil's a little bit sleepy at the moment they're still coming out of their recession but we're gonna see a lot more activity Mexico is really putting an aggressive point and a lot of the basis for it is renewable energy is really its biggest ingredient is money and so cost of capital and is the biggest differentiator on how much renewable energy you're gonna want to install so in our current low-cost capital we've got mortgages at what four and a half percent or three and a half percent it's a great time to borrow low-cost money and install renewable energy and infrastructure whereas 10-15 years ago you had much higher capital costs just a few more wind on the left and solar here and just giving you some idea of what's going on in these markets these are some fairly large numbers I'm using a different metric back to investors so now we're in EMEA Europe Middle East Africa so we've gone from Latin and South America across you can see the countries on the left and what we're looking at is the equity returns so these are the fat cats who have all their billions and millions and they're trying to figure out where they can get the most secure and highest return on their dollars and renewable energy continues to be a really attractive investment last week I was in midtown Manhattan at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum it's where all the big investors come 200 people together and they talk about all the complex financial models tax equity deals mezzanine debt all the tricks of a trade that as an engineer I still try to learn but it's pretty interesting all the models and by the way there's also a continued discussion on yield codes and other methods in order to allow the public to buy for example a fund that directly invested in so you could spend a thousand dollars and be a partial owner to a wind farm and how you get in there and the disappointment that while it's a great vehicle some people had gone in too aggressively too fast and they didn't fail but they did not pan out and one large company which is a local issue here Sun Edison Sun Edison bought first wind first wind a familiar name of a wind developer here in Portland Sun Edison bought them they completely overextended spent about 800 million dollars on buying a bunch of wind turbines and then failed to place those turbines into service and couldn't make the debt payments and they went under so why I put this up here is if you look in the countries now here the players there's the developer the private equity entity this is in the utility and larger institutional investors might be a big insurance company that has all this money that they're investing in trying to keep it going or could actually be a pension fund teachers retirement funds and in this case you can see where the risk is so obviously South Africa they're earning more money because it's higher risk and Kenya and other places and you can just get it another idea of where Germany is interesting because it's so well known renewable energy is so well understood it's such a strong defined business that the risks are low so you don't get very much money for it so you have to go to other markets the take away again is it's very active market there's this year alone in the United States one bank key bank based in Ohio their managing director said last week that they will be placing anywhere between 2.5 and 3 billion dollars in wind and solar in 2017 and if you think about the money in your checking account or savings you'd be pretty happy if you could get a return and these are returns that are backed up by a 20-year power purchase agreement they're really pretty secure this is not volatile stuff that's going to run around these numbers are pretty solid new market that's really we just won two jobs in Egypt interestingly enough a lot of excitement in the solar field Turkey is another market that's on the move Spain Italy and the UK had some very aggressive obligations renewable obligation we in this country call them RPS renewable portfolio standard so in the case of Massachusetts they just passed a policy that requests 1600 megawatts of renewable energy for Massachusetts so they're requiring their utility to get 1600 megawatts of renewable energy or else if they don't they get penalized for it so you're seeing a push for 400 megawatts of offshore and then they're looking at bringing in hydropower down from hydro Quebec and that's the discussions you hear on what's the New Hampshire transmission line and there's now a transmission line through the bottom of Lake Champlain coming in so these are all the wrestling based on these various policies and market trends the point is not I'm sorry I'm using one of our company slides but these are the projects were involved in my reason for including it is just to give you an idea of some of the things going on a lot of work on the Somali Kenyan border where there's so much unrest coming in is to look at wind and solar to keep people in the villages because you're displacing high-cost diesel fuel I was doing a fair amount of work in Somali land two years ago where the cost of electricity is a dollar 15 per kilowatt hour remember we're 15 cents their dollar 15 and they've got this awesome resource they've got the cool one of a six and a half seven Sun our Sun resource and an excellent wind resource through there but right next to my project is an old mig jet all filled with bullet holes and they don't bother to change the oil they don't bother to think about things because when I ask some of the 30-year-olds who were involved in the clashes in the war they say why should we bother to fix it it's just going to get blown up so I've been over to the Commission to wind farm and I've been back to repair it and now it's broken again because no one wants to maintain it a lot of really great work going on in South Africa Nigeria we're doing a big project in Ghana right now Africa is a big region for growth and you saw the expected return on equity and that's why the money's going down there but I think it's also interesting if you look at South Africa where this is levelized in dollars per megawatt so we're still at six cents four cents these are still the numbers for auctions so that the developer has to bid into the market and says I'm willing to give you electricity at this price just like a normal auction so these aren't super high prices but that's to me another example of renewable energy is successful the utilities are buying it the prices are low and they are not going down the oil path they are choosing renewable energy back to the Caribbean there's a very large utility another local name Amara Ringelbell Amara so utility around here so they their development models they buy utilities in the Caribbean so they bought they run the concession in Barbados Grand Bahama Dominique couple others and the head of Amara said no more no diesels we're not going to consider natural gas we're only doing a solar and possibly wind because that's most secure they can make the most money on it and it's got the least risk and they don't have to deal with all the other issues of infrastructure all they've got to do is find some land and bring it in and now they're really moving hard I'm working with Amara in Grand Bahama on battery storage and also flywheels and the idea of the flywheel is when you have the cloud coming over your solar panel that's down here and that cloud may cover the solar panel for five seconds ten seconds and that power on that solar panel what's it do with the cloud coming over so all you got to do is just hold that energy for typically what we're finding is anywhere between six to thirteen seconds is all we need so we don't need a big massive hours of storage we just need to bridge through to bring that intermittent technology to a useful form I had to put this in so we were the technical advisor for Google Google bought one third of the Lake Turkana wind farm which isn't the very top of Kenya there's a hundred and twenty million dollar investment and is the largest wind farm three hundred and ten megawatts in the continent of Africa and I just love these guys jackets this is the security guys he's got his gun in his hand he's got another gun here and we'll blow you away with a wind turbine there and I just thought that was a great security guard coat they love them and these are two condens I mean around the corner or folks with those necklaces stacked to extend their necks and they don't know that there's a world out there we're talking complete pack remote Kenya you still buy a bride with camels and they spent as you can imagine Google spent a lot of time considering the social impacts how could they ensure that the truck drivers we changed the route of the truck drivers bringing the turbines in wind turbines in so that they wouldn't be near villages for fear of AIDS and other issues and keeping things separate so it's it's just now getting commissioned it's a four-year project it's a interesting example of trying to bring in appropriate technology we've been owners engineer in Mongolia we're now on the second wind farm but these are Chinese wind turbines brought up from China made by GE General Electric 1.6 megawatts and the at the border because the Mongolians and Chinese don't get along they have a whole bunch of armed guards lined up and the trucks stop and the Chinese drivers get out of the trucks and go one way and then the Mongolian drivers get in the trucks and then you continue driving to site it's a 2,000 kilometer trip and you can see some of the tower sections coming across this is in middle to northern Mongolia the one we're doing right now is in the Gobi Desert gives you some of the scale of the blades and this is a fairly small this is a 1.6 megawatt with about a 95 95 yeah 95 meter rotor tip-to-tip and down in Curacao I mentioned the island there those are 3.5 megawatts or double the size in rating and they have a 117 meter rotor so coming back to this country and a little bit closer Block Island is now in the water it's met COD so this is a small 30 megawatt project off our coast of Rhode Island the whole basis is that this would enable them to leapfrog the larger projects it was just a month ago they signed a 90 megawatt so triple the size power purchase agreement just south of this wind farm and it's going to allow them to run a transmission cable into Montauk on the east end of Long Island and you could imagine the difficulty of running transmission from out west or excuse me northern New York down through New York City to get powered along Island so it's another benefit of offshore wind because you've got an easy way to bring that transmission cable right in to where the demand is these projects are in anywhere from 20 to 25 meters depth pretty classic foundation style these wind turbines are 6 megawatts so these are big machines 6 megawatt rated and I think you're going to see more of those coming closer we have the University of Maine project MAV to build to floating so this one's fixed so these are fixed to the bottom and then the University of Maine and Chinbro and Amera consortium are pushing forward to put two machines off south of Monhegan and the idea is to demonstrate a particular style of floating technology it's a concrete foundation or float buoyancy that floats below the surface and then the tower of the turbine is coming up this is called the transition piece because really from about here up is just a standard wind turbine with some marine paint but otherwise it's about the same so the idea with University of Maine and the MAV consortium is can their foundation technology is it cheaper better because you're not going to install a fixed foundation in deep water in the case of a lot of areas all across the west coast certain areas off Long Island to the south and clearly Maine and markets in Europe and also Japan our hot markets for deep water wind so the only way to do it there is floating you might recall hearing the term high wind or stat oil this is when Governor LaPage did something pretty shocking in that he rescinded a signed contract that the Public Utilities Commission of Maine signed a power purchase agreement with stat oil to put in a demonstration project and he felt that the MAV project or I'm not sure what he felt I would never say that so anyways the outcome was that he yanked the contract and stat oil which is a monster company oil group based in Norway just said goodbye and left they now put their project that same project in Scotland I bring them up because they're probably one of the leaders on floating offshore technology so in effect the MAV main project is competing with stat oil and who's going to have the better technology doesn't make sense can you bring the cost down so speaking of costs offshore wind power is still more expensive obviously but it's coming down rapidly the these this project in Black Island I think the power purchase agreement is about 23 cents a kilowatt hour so we've gone from those four numbers and and some of the solar numbers at 18 19 we're up at 23 and now in Europe some of the current projects have been bidding in around nine cents nine and ten cents and the South Fork project I don't recall the actual number but it's significantly less than Black Island so ready for your imagination you got Maine Massachusetts Rhode Island Connecticut New York New Jersey Maryland Delaware all the way down so that's the coast and there is a whole set of approximately eight leases that companies such as stat oil mentioned deep water wind they're the developer for Black Island Avon grid there's a local name now here in Maine as you know Ibidrola and Scottish power the big European utilities bought central Maine power and they've came up with their name yeah Avon grid so they have gone out to the BOEM Bureau of Offshore Energy and Mines which is a federal entity that is in charge of the Continental Shelf and administering that and the boom has put areas up for lease so there's a public auction and the highest bidder meeting all certain criteria bid to have access and lease a set of area out on the ocean and then they would go and develop an offshore wind farm so stat oil won a lease off of Fire Island south of Long Island deep water just won a big lease down in Maryland there's another group called US Wind interestingly in Maryland they require instead of a renewable portfolio standard they have a thing called OREC which is offshore renewable energy credit so you have to prove that you're going to hire people in the state sounds familiar build industry do things there and benefit the state by having your project there I think that the offshore business in the United States is still nascent still yet to see but the benefits of this is one of our densest population all along the East Coast the area along what's called the PGM a transmission sector in New Jersey and Delaware and Pennsylvania and Connecticut that whole southern part of New York is so thick with people infrastructure and transmission the ability to have a grid along the east eastern seaboard and have capacity factors of some 50 and 60% capacity factor similar to this Curacao wind farm whereas a wind farm in Maine is running at about 35 to 40% capacity factor and have it easily brought in through the mud in a cable and right into your substation in into New York and Washington and all along I think is a pretty significant benefit and you will see offshore coming you will see the prices continue to come down like so many of the other graphs throughout lots of storage technologies lots of names Tesla other kinds of things that we've been going through you're going to see a lot more a couple of points from our industry when the current administration wants to cut the offers of energy and renewables 79 72% Rick Perry this is just two weeks ago has come up with a really interesting method to benefit coal and that is to require all generation plants to have 30 days of energy storage on site and you're not going to have natural gas plants put in tanks on site they get their fuel through pipelines so this is their method to combat the renewable energy field and the natural gas field and support what they talked about with coal from my point of view that means they're picking on the natural gas lobby and I have a feeling the natural gas lobby is pretty powerful and will not allow that to move along a couple of other points to finish on on that one is I thought is interesting of one of the largest utilities in the United States Ralph Izzo and you can read his comment utilities love renewables it's really helped them they haven't had to invest in it someone else remember the private equities investing in it and they're getting this low-cost energy their clients like it because it's clean and it's producing a lot of jobs I think this is another interesting point that our Beijing office is growing significantly continues to push away that's where that country is going and then here's just another point on solar imagine the United States California and the East so I talked about having offshore wind here because not many people want a big huge grid coming from the wind of the middle of the country going right through their backyard and the cost of that coming all the way this is literally we're talking Wyoming Oklahoma and this coming all the way through here it's also a political fight because the eastern governors want the activity in the business and the manufacturing in your state you don't want to be sending your money out west to buy this electricity you want to generate it locally in the jobs which is so much of a classic foundation and just like everything in our world it's all about money and it's all about how people want to do things so why we're seeing such an explosion of renewable energy around the world and I feel a lot of the free market economies is because they may not have access to equity money the governments typically don't have access to money unless they're getting low-cost financing from China who's trying to have shall I say hook them in to say if we'll give you money if you buy our products and Europe has really scaled down on that the United States has scaled down on that you heard the hubbub about the Exxon Bank last year to shut down the Exxon Bank which tends to subsidize US manufacturers so GE which is a large wind turbine manufacturer works to get low-cost subsidized financing to go into Africa or Poland Turkey and these other ideas to bring in US products so from the those types of points and now the Paris Accords and other news for us on a worldwide basis it's very disappointing because it takes us out of the regular activity and interchange I would say on a local basis the good news is we make decisions on a state level so really while the White House can make a lot of noise on policy most all of these renewable portfolio standards Massachusetts offshore policy these different efforts that are going on out west the Texas story California is going to quadruple their amount of photo will takes in the next few years those are all based on absolute in-state policy that are continuing to drive renewables forward and hire people and it's all based on classic lobbying in politics of the businesses in those states so I'm still upbeat I'm feeling like we lost a lot of progress with the current administration because there was so much excitement in 2008 the American Wind Energy Association annual big conference in Chicago had 22,000 people this year a month ago in Anaheim California 6,000 so yeah businesses still going we're still doing things but things are not upbeat and moving forward I'm gonna wrap up so questions and one of the results that came back just a few minutes ago they announced 4.2 billion dollar wind stymied in Ohio the House refuses to ease restrictive zoning so they're putting this stranglehold on 4.2 billion dollars worth of economic development and infrastructure investments I guess out of spite I'm not sure exactly why but is that the project that you were making reference to earlier in your presentation thank you and the my reference was that there's a large bank in Ohio okay and I was wondering if they were the ones that were I'm sure they have some mistake in it it's just remarkable to me that you know you have this kind of development potential and then it's probably backed by an administration that it's a long back you know fighting this industry with getting dispelling mist you know more birds are killed with by cars and plate glass windows and all of these and cats but people love to pick on wind turbines you know there's all these things that go out there and we just in all of the work we do have to make sure we go find the right information and get grounded on absolutely yeah no that's a one of our clients buying a large portfolio down in Latin America was asked us to really look into what would be the difference on a changing of the El Nino and El Nino change and would it show yes so green banks not familiar our private public quasi entities New York's got a really strong one and they've gone out and raised it a variety of different monies types of money in order to inst in push on policy so that the green bank is taking what the state policy is and really saying okay that's the goal then let's help finance to reach those goals yeah totally different because these are the green banks are cause our first of all state and private so they're run more by a yeah they may yeah well I'm gonna so I'll answer questions no I don't see it on dependent on fossil fuels I'm not answering the question right here's what I see let me try it back no I don't see it 100% renewable but I do see that we have it on renewable energy and possibly fusion and some other types of storage mechanisms and other things I did I see that fossil fuel will probably price itself out of the market at some point we'll start to deal with the externalities and the cleanup costs and the insurance companies and I will count on the free market will drive us toward more secure one of the another reason why renewable energy so popular is this CFO if I may in the companies they love the predictability because once you lock that cost of capital in you're not dealing with volatile prices I can predict that so these are the kinds of things that I think will win over so that's why you're gonna see some other things as I say it won't be 100% renewable but you'll see other technologies come in and we'll use fossil fuels for peaking or other certain good uses of them well there's some push on on clean coal which is sequestering the carbon so they're trying to they're still carbon it's this normal cycle of using coal to heat steam create steam used and turn the turbine and generate electricity but then they're driving the emissions down in and trying to bring it back into some underground stored of the carbon cycle so I don't know about that particular project but it's one of those ideas it was actually on my my chart of people fooling around with but the costs are still astronomical you know back to my point on not running out of energy there's wild stuff going out there algae and and all kinds of things that are happening the question is when do they hit the ability just like I I like to say when people say oh you work in the alternative energy field I say no no we're mainstream look at those prices we're renewable energy but those other ones are alternative and will they'll come along we'll see lots more electricity we're gonna move so much closer to electricity with smart grid with the idea of these battery packages and solar panels and plug-in hybrids so you plug your car in when you come in and then the utility can use if we had 10,000 plug-in hybrids all around the region and the utility could balance those rather than turning on another generator that operator would say I'm gonna use those folks cars for the next 20 minutes and see if I can get by without bringing on more energy so that's the dream and that the intent of smart grid we'll see lots and lots if I were 23 again right now whereas when I was renewable energy is like yeah that's cool I would be all about smart grid and battery storage to me it's just fascinating all the technology and new things that are coming up some of the simple things that are happening to green mom power just announced that they're they have a program where they're in a sense controlling your water heater and using that as a place to put in so they're able to control it without making any changes in your lifestyle you're able to think outside the box they're really doing some very creative work there so okay enough more thank you so much