 So, thank you, everyone, for being in here and so that we can start this next session. And we are so pleased that you are all here for this. We've got two sessions that we're doing, taking a look at renewable energy and providing an overview and we are also as part of that looking at some of the supportive things that are necessary for that, like you will hear from our presentation from USGS. So to start off this afternoon for this, we are going to hear first from Amy Halloran, who is the Senior Manager for Renewable Energy Programs with Sandia National Laboratories. And I should just say that National Laboratories and Sandia is such an important one, have made such an enormous contribution to so many disciplines, to so much scientific discovery, to so many applications in the whole energy portfolio and beyond. And so it is really important for people to understand, to know about these national labs and the national jewels that they really present and how important they are and how much they really, I think that we really need to be supporting them. And so to hear a little bit about Sandia and all of the work that they have been doing in renewable energy for many years is Amy. Good afternoon. Thank you Carol. That's a great introduction. I am here representing Sandia National Labs as the Manager for Renewable Energy Research and Development Program, but I'm also going to talk about contributions that other national labs have made to renewable energy for the nation and for the world. Our research program at Sandia has been going on about 40 years in renewable energy and it really came about after the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, where that really made the nation see energy, security, energy independence as a national security issue. Since that time, many of the Department of Energy's 17 national labs, so there are 17 of us out there, we've had a real impact on the nation's energy portfolio. Some examples that we have are, as you've heard in the last speaker, the cost of wind power in the U.S. has decreased by more than 90 percent since the early 1980s. Sandia's wind program developed and tested multiple wind turbine blades now used by industry that allowed them to reduce their weight and increase their structural efficiency. On a recent project for ARPA-E, we were able to design a new wind turbine blade that reduces blade mass by 25 percent, which will further reduce the cost of new wind deployments. We designed the first wind turbine blade to be built with 3D printed molds, which will allow rapid production of new blade designs. We've also mitigated radar interference caused by wind turbines so that they could be deployed near military installations. The cost of solar energy has fallen 96 percent and now stands at less than a dollar a watt for the solar module itself before installation. The National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado is working further to bring down the cost of solar energy by addressing soft costs, things like solar financing and other non-hardware costs, as well as market barriers. This will enable faster, easier, less expensive installations. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee have developed a coating that makes solar panels less reflective, which therefore allows more sunlight to get to the PV panels, and more water repellent so that water literally bounces off the panels, carrying away dust and dirt that block the sunlight. Energy developed and tested at Sandia's National Solar Thermal Test Facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have been used at every commercial, concentrating solar plant in the world. Our oldest form of large-scale renewable energy in the U.S. is hydropower, which currently provides 7 percent of the U.S.'s electricity. Pacific Northwest National Lab in Washington State has completed research for the Army Corps of Engineers that provides fishery managers with the best possible information to improve salmon passage at dams and to enhance the endangered fish's overall health and survival. The newest form of renewable energy is also hydropower, using marine hydrokinetic or wave energy to produce electricity. Researchers at Sandia have developed advanced controls algorithms for the wave energy converters that convert the wave energy into electricity that have the potential to increase energy output by 200 to 300 percent. Research by the National Labs has also had an impact on energy efficiency. PNNL and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California have recently licensed a portable sensor suitcase to two commercial companies. The suitcase contains easy-to-use sensors and other equipment that will allow these companies to identify energy-saving opportunities in small commercial buildings that will save the building owners about 10 percent on their energy bills. And research in renewable energy has also benefited other energy areas. Over two-thirds of the oil we use today comes from wells drilled with polycrystalline diamond compact drill bits. Sandia National Labs conducted and catalyzed research nearly 30 years ago under the Geothermal Energy Technology Program that enabled PDC drill bits to become commercially viable. These drill bits, coupled with fundamental research completed in Sandia's geophysics labs, micro seismic imaging techniques is what has enabled the development of the U.S.'s tight oil and natural gas resources. This has resulted in the U.S. becoming the world's top producer of petroleum and natural gas for the past five years. Because of this research done by the labs, academia, industry, the U.S. is well on our way to achieving energy independence. In January, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected that the U.S. could become a net energy exporter in less than a decade. We will also continue to increase our generation of energy-using renewable resources. More than 60 percent of the new electricity sources that came online in 2016 were wind and solar. Fossil fuels accounted for the lowest share of energy generation that they had in the past century, ever since we converted from wood to coal. In March of this year, the amount of electricity generated by wind and solar alone exceeded 10 percent in the U.S., and in some states, more than one-third of the energy is from renewable resources. For example, wind and solar made up 37 percent of the electricity in Iowa last year and provided at least 20 percent of the electricity in six other states. In March and again in April, generation from renewable resources exceeded nuclear generation for the first time since 1984. Although these numbers are significant, there are still many research challenges that need to be addressed to continue to enhance our energy independence and reduce our carbon footprint. These challenges include how do you optimize the design and operation of a wind farm? For example, you can't achieve the same efficiency with multiple turbines that you have with one. One turbine will create a wake, which then impacts the other ones. So the Department of Energy Labs are using supercomputers that the Department has invested in for defense applications and are now using them to model wind farm performance and optimize the design, construction, and operation of the current wind farms out there. How do we harness the potential power available near the U.S. coastlines from wave energy? This represents an untapped resource that is estimated to be able to generate 900 terawatt hours per year or enough to power 81 million homes. Research needs include materials that can withstand the ocean environment, devices that can minimize the impact on ocean life, and more efficient energy converters. How do we use renewable energy to increase the energy security of our military's operations? The military accounts for 80 percent of federal energy use and is continuing to look at renewables as a way to cut their fuel tether and improve the safety and security of their mission. We also need to ensure that all of our energy sources, fossil, nuclear, renewable, as well as the electric grid are protected from cyber attacks. All of the U.S. energy infrastructure is reliant on advanced control systems that are complex and increasingly connected to the Internet, making them vulnerable to cyber attacks. Three national labs, Idaho National Lab, PNNL, and Sandia have formed a partnership to complete R&D to secure the U.S.'s electric grid so that we are protected from scenarios similar to the one that happened in 2015 when an attacker took down parts of the grid in the Ukraine. I'd like to close with continued investment in renewable energy R&D. We can address these challenges and ensure that the U.S. maintains our leadership role in renewable energy while we increase the security of our nation's energy systems. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much, Amy. And we are now going to turn to Steve Clemer, who is the director of energy research and analysis with the Union of Concerned Scientists. And because these scientists are very concerned, you're also getting a special handout that is coming your way right now. And of course, UCS has long been a very strong advocate in terms of doing all sorts of research and analysis with regard to all forms of renewable energy. Steve? Thank you, Carol. It's great to be here today. Since you're not going to let us do PowerPoint presentations, I figured I'd just bring a handout instead. No technical difficulties, yeah. This will help you follow along with what I'm going to talk about, which is the costs and benefits of federal tax credits and state renewable electricity standards as drivers for renewable energy development. As we've heard from other speakers, renewables are diversifying the U.S. electricity mix. The share of non-hydro renewables has tripled over the last decade from about 3% of the U.S. electricity mix in 2007 to 9% in 2016, according to data from EIA. And most of this growth has been in wind and solar, as we've heard. When you include hydro, renewables provided about 15% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2016. We've also seen a really significant increase in natural gas generation from about 22% of the mix in 2007 to 34% in 2016. And the growth in renewables in natural gas has largely replaced coal generation in the U.S. while nuclear generation has stayed about the same. So there's been many drivers for renewable energy growth in the U.S. Federal policies obviously have been a big one, including the tax credits, but also accelerated depreciation. And R&D, as we heard from Amy, has been a big driver. State policies have also played an important role, including renewable electricity standards, but also financial incentives. Policies like net metering have been important for solar in particular. We've also seen, as Amy was describing, major cost reductions that have occurred due to technology innovations and economies of scale and manufacturing in construction, development, operation and maintenance that have all helped drive down the cost and improve the technologies over time. And voluntary renewable energy purchases have also played a role, especially lately. We've seen a big increase in corporate purchases of renewable energy, in part because the costs have been coming down and it's become a very attractive option for a lot of Fortune 500 companies as well as small businesses. Strong growth in the global market has also played a role because obviously it provides exports for the U.S., but also the deployment of these technologies globally also has an impact in terms of reducing the cost. So there's been all these drivers, but several reports by DOE and the National Labs have shown that federal tax credits and state renewable standards have been some of the most important drivers for the growth of renewable energy. According to Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, state renewable standards were responsible for more than half of the growth in non-hydro-renewable generation between 2000 and 2016. The public policy rationale for tax credits and renewable standards and other renewable policies really, it represents a way to value the environmental and other public health benefits that renewable energy provide that are currently not priced in energy markets or captured by other policies. That helps improve the playing field for renewable energy to compete more with the mature fossil and nuclear industries. And many of these policies have enjoyed bipartisan support. Part of the reason for that is because of the new jobs and economic development that it provides to a lot of state and local economies, especially states that don't have fossil fuel resources, which there are a lot of them out there. Of course, the environmental, climate and public health benefits have been part of the rationale as well as energy diversity and so forth. So the recent five-year tax credit extension for the production tax credit and the investment tax credit that happened at the end of 2015 really has brought a lot more long-term stability and predictability to both the wind and the solar industry. We've seen U.S. wind capacity more than double since 2010, and it's accounted for more than a third of all new generating capacity since 2007. In 2016, the wind industry installed 80 to 100 megawatts of wind capacity, reaching about 82,000 megawatts nationally and exceeding hydrocapacity for the first time. The federal PTC played a big role in this. It's an incentive that's tied to the amount of electricity that's generated from eligible renewable facilities, and that encourages efficiency and innovation to maximize production to take advantage and get the most money out of it. The PTC was passed as part of the Energy Policy Act of 1992, and it was extended by Congress seven times, and it was allowed to expire six times, and that really created a boom bus cycle on the industry in the past. But after many years of the policy uncertainty, Congress passed a new five-year extension in 2015, as I said, and that's expected to drive about 9,000 megawatts of renewables for the next five years or so. It's also had a huge benefit to the solar industry, which set a record in 2016 for installing 14,800 megawatts, and the CEA and GTM project that solar is going to triple over the next five years due to the ITC extension. I want to talk a little bit about the cost of the tax credits, which has gotten a lot of attention lately, and the cost for renewables, but currently they're receiving more subsidies than fossil fuels, but a more accurate comparison actually is to look at subsidies over a longer period of time because conventional energy sources have been part of the permanent tax code for decades, and they were important for jump-starting those industries. An analysis that Awea did in 2016 showed that between 1947 and 2015, wind only received about 3 percent of all federal energy incentives compared to about two-thirds for fossil fuels and over 20 percent for nuclear power. So with state RPS, renewable portfolio standards, those are in place in 29 states in the District of Columbia. Many states have increased their targets over the past two decades. Hawaii has the highest target at 100 percent, followed by Vermont at 75 percent, and then there's California, New York, Oregon, and D.C. have targets of 50 percent. Nineteen states have targets over 20 percent. As I said before, LBNL projects that state RPS is responsible for over half of the development since 2000, and most of that has been wind and solar. The standards apply to 56 percent of total U.S. retail electricity sales in the country. LBNL and NREL have actually done a series of really interesting reports around state RPS's looking at both retrospective costs and benefits, as well as the future costs and benefits of those standards. The analysis they did of the past standards found that the cost of meeting those standards was modest. On average across the country, it was about 1.3 percent of retail electricity bills, or about $12 per megawatt hour. They also, as part of that study, looked at the benefits, which were substantially larger than the cost. They quantified the environmental, climate, and public health benefits, which they found were about three times higher than the cost of the PTC, which is about $23, $24, a megawatt hour. They also looked at job benefits. They also quantified savings and consumer electricity bills, as well as savings on consumer natural gas bills, because when renewables displace natural gas, it actually helps put downward pressure on natural gas prices, which can help lower the price of natural gas for consumers who heat their homes with natural gas or power businesses with natural gas. They reached similar findings for their studies that looked at the future benefits of state RPSs, where the benefits greatly exceeded the costs. Then I just wanted to close by, I guess, quickly highlighting some of the benefits from these policies, the economic benefits. We heard from Amy about the cost reductions. Both wind and solar costs have fallen by more than two-thirds since 2009. I think our next panel with OEA and SEA will talk more about this, but the job benefits from wind and solar, so the wind industry supports 102,000 jobs, which are twice as much as what they had in the year 2013. They also have 500 manufacturing facilities that are located in 43 states across the country. One thing that's really significant about this increase in manufacturing capacity is that in 2007, the U.S. was importing probably 80 percent of the wind turbine components into the U.S., and now with all the increase in manufacturing capacity, we're producing about 50 to 85 percent of the components domestically, depending on which components you're talking about. The solar industry has also doubled since 2012 with 260,000 jobs at over 9,000 companies in every state in the country, and with the ITC extension for solar, the industry projects that there'll be 420,000 jobs by 2020 and $132 billion investment. I'm just going to close with that and just say that in conclusion, the labs and DOE have shown that the federal tax credits and state renewable standards are important drivers for renewable energy development in the U.S. The economic benefits of these policies have exceeded the costs by as much as three times, and the costs of renewables continue to fall, making renewable energy more affordable for consumers. Thank you. Thank you. So, as you've heard from these two speakers, there has been so much change and so much in terms of looking at benefits, how it affects manufacturing, costs, jobs across the country. It's really incredible in terms of the kind of change that we're looking at. Well, for our third speaker on this panel, we're going to hear about a little bit different aspect, and this is Ann Kissinger, who is the Associate Director for Ecosystems with USGS, the US Geological Survey. USGS is known for, and I think many times a lot of people don't know probably what all USGS does. Everything from thinking about helping us in terms of monitoring and warnings with regard to earthquakes to the tremendous amount of work that they do with regard to thinking about water quality and so much that's involved with that. USGS also has an important connection with regard to renewables because they really are able to look at what needs to happen in order for renewables to be situated different places so that we can also minimize any kind of impact up on other natural systems and upon a habitat. So to talk to us more about that, Ann. So, yes, I was going to start with, you're wondering why I'm here today because people don't normally associate USGS with some of what we do, but in fact we do a lot of work supporting the Department of Interior in what's called its trust responsibilities, and that is where interior is charged by law with protecting lands or species, so things like golden eagles and anything protected by the migratory bird treaty act, species that might be proposed for listing, and then assisting the 500 plus million acres of DOI land managers in making decisions about permitting and siding energy facilities, not only oil and gas, but also renewable energy. So it's a little known field, as you say. We work very broadly with, of course, all the DOI agencies, but also with NGOs, with states, with DOE, even USDA on our work to protect these species, and we're in fact the second largest mission area in USGS, which surprises folks. We came in from all walks of life in DOI in the 90s, bringing together all the biological science functions. So we've got about 70 scientists at 12 of our USGS science centers who are working on renewable energy, and that's in 40 plus states, so it's a pretty big program for us. Before I go too much further, I did want to introduce Mona Khalil, she's our energy and wildlife specialist at USGS, and she's what we call a SWAC, which is someone who actually knows something, so... Did she get an award for it? Every time she speaks, yes. So I encourage you to see her out in between breaks and whatnot. So what we do really in this area is we assess the impacts to wildlife from a range of different energy types, and that's the things we've been talking about here today, wind, solar, biofuels, hydropower, and traditional oil and gas. And some of the major areas where we work is bats and wind energy. So not everybody loves bats, but they might be surprised to know they provide over three billion dollars worth of benefits to agriculture every year in terms of pest control. They're also in a very steep decline because of a fungus called white nose syndrome, and so in order to ease permitting at wind facilities in particular, we have to find ways to not kill bats. Golden eagles, I mentioned, they're protected under the Golden Eagle Protection Act. They're very difficult in the sense that they're long-lived, they're very mobile. We don't have a very good understanding of population-level impacts of wind, and so we are working to try to minimize the fatal collisions by being able to do some modeling. With regard to hydropower, we actually have a great facility called the Conti Lab that actually has a significant amount of work on fish passage, so that's not only things like salmon, but also species that may be candidates for listening or at risk. So why does this matter to you all? Well, it isn't just the birds and bunnies, as I'm often accused of representing. It really is about the energy, this renewable energy sector, and many of you may have experienced how difficult it can be to get a permit because of fish and wildlife concerns, particularly on the federal lands, but not just the federal lands. For example, with Golden Eagles, the Fish and Wildlife Service gets the final say about siting of wind energy facilities. One thing we've certainly learned as we've been working with you all is that uncertainty, scientific uncertainty, is extremely costly to industry. The less we know, the more conservative the regulators need to be to protect the species they're asked by law to protect. And so we really try to provide more certainty to the industry. And that reduces the risks, both the financial risks but most importantly the legal risks because it's very common to have legal challenges to the siting of renewable energy. And those often are on the basis of fish and wildlife conservation or lands protection. And also we help with the risk assessment. So the tools we're developing, and I'll give you a couple examples in the time I have. The risk assessment helps. We are giving tools to the developers, also to our federal partners, but to developers to help them up front understand where they can propose siting a facility that isn't going to be, isn't a high conflict area, as we call it, where they're going to run into either multiple uses on federal lands or simply the projections are that they're just going to take too many protected species. So that removes, in our view, that also removes a lot of the uncertainty in the decision making. So it's all about tools. We often work at the landscape scale, which isn't a certain size, but actually is just the scale at which the decision needs to be made. So that could be a ridge top, but it could also be, you know, the 11 state sagebrush biome. And as I mentioned, we do risk assessments. We also do a lot of modeling to help with project permitting. And then some innovative technologies that we've been working with, particularly the wind industry but also solar industry, to help them plan their operations to minimize the take. So just a few examples. I mentioned the risk to golden eagles. And what we did there was work with our Fish and Wildlife Service colleagues to develop a predictive tool that allows them to estimate the potential eagle fatalities. And that would be prior to construction. The tool is available to industry, so they're able to put forward projects in places with high wind potential but low potential for conflict. We, with regard to bats, tree roosting bats are very much at risk from wind turbines. And they're very difficult in vexing to study because they're nocturnal. They're small. If they're injured, they don't necessarily just fall to the ground so people can walk around picking them up. They often will fly a distance and it's very hard to understand what's going on there. So we actually got some funding from DOE to work on a collaboration with Bat Conservation International and a wind operator. And we're testing technologies and kind of operational scenarios based on bat behavior and weather conditions. So that's something that industry can do, as I say, up front and incorporate into their permit applications. We also are looking at UV illumination technology, hoping that we can find a way to deter bats as they approach the wind turbines and avoid them altogether. And that is actually showing great promise. With regard to wind and solar, one of the most vexing things to understand is how many are getting killed and what that does have as it cascades up to the population level. So we have been developing a statistical tool. I'm afraid to tell you what it is called because it sounds a lot like Donald Rundfeld when he said the known unknowns or the unknown knowns, I don't remember. But it's called the Evidence of Absence Model. But it's turned out to be a very good tool for estimating bird and bat fatalities when you can't actually get out on the ground and count the critters. So we do have to rely on modeling. And then the last thing I'll say is in the hydropower realm, we do work very closely with the hydropower industry and with the folks at the Bureau of Reclamation and FERC, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, you probably already know that, to optimize the operation and dams of operation and design of hydropower dams so that we can satisfy power demand while minimizing the impacts on fish. And we have some very large projects. We actually work on the operations of Glen Canyon Dam and the release is there to support endangered fish while providing power to millions of people, many of them in poverty. So that's not something you want to reduce power production. And as I mentioned, we have our Conti Anatomus Fish Laboratory. And that is a unique large scale flume that allows us to really test out and look at the hydrodynamic aspect of dams while looking at different fish passage options. So we worked on the also on dam removals. There are a lot of dams out there now that don't generate a significant amount of power, but they are costly and they could be very damaging to remove. But we were heavily involved in the L-Y dam removal. And now in Oregon in the Klamath Basin, there's a couple of dams, low head dams that are coming out. And we're helping look at the sediment flows and how to restore the river. So that's just a quick briefing. I didn't want to run over my time. But we would love to connect with those of you who are interested in the fish and wildlife and land management aspects of siding and permitting. We think that a lot of the tools we're developing are going to be used widely throughout the industry. And we're pretty excited. It's a little niche, but it's an important one. We all remember the pup fish. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.