Welcome to this second panel of the policy form for the Congressional Renewable and Energy Efficiency Clean Technology Expo. It's amazing how quiet it just got. Thank you very, very much. And I am Carol Werner, the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. And of course we are honored to once again put this on in conjunction with the bipartisan congressional renewable and efficiency caucus. And of course EESI is a nonprofit that was organized by a bipartisan congressional caucus to work on issues of energy and environmental issues, sustainability to be problem solving. And we've been doing that for over 30 years now. So I wanted to just make sure to repeat that again. So let us get this policy panel underway. We have some wonderful speakers here. And our first leadoff speaker for this panel is Kayla Prendergast, who is a program associate for the Building Clean program of the Blue-Green Alliance. Good morning everyone. I'm so excited to be here. And thank you Carol for that introduction. Also thanks to the rest of the staff at EESI for putting this great event together. We're so appreciative. Today is a great opportunity to bring prominent leaders together to discuss the connection between America's clean energy economy and good jobs for American workers and energy efficiency sector. Particularly in the often forgotten energy efficiency manufacturing industries. My name is Kayla, as Carol said, and I work for the Blue-Green Alliance Foundation's Building Clean initiative. At BGIF, we believe solving our nation's environmental challenges will create and sustain good jobs, strengthen American manufacturing, and build a strong clean energy economy. But what are clean energy jobs? Most people might answer that they are solar and wind jobs. But in reality, clean jobs are so much more than that. Energy efficiency is the largest and fastest growing job sector in America's clean energy economy. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, energy efficiency is the number one largest energy resource in the United States. And energy efficiency workers are the workers that install energy efficiency products in buildings and homes and workers that are manufacturing these products across the United States. In fact, there are more than 2.3 million Americans working in energy efficiency today, which includes construction, manufacturing, wholesale trade, engineering, sales, and many other jobs. In fact, in 2018 alone, more than 76,000 new jobs were created in the energy efficiency sector, continuing the trend of the energy efficiency seeing the highest percentage growth of all the energy sectors. Also last year, more than 320,000 Americans were working to make energy efficiency products, with one out of four in energy efficiency appliance manufacturing, energy efficiency appliance manufacturing specifically. And this just includes products like energy star refrigerators, energy star washer dryers, and other energy star products that you can find in the home or other commercial spaces. And this growth is not expected to slow down. Next year, domestic manufacturing jobs and energy efficiency are expected to increase by nearly 6%. And it could be even higher if we link our energy efficiency spending to the purchase of local, and if it's not available locally, you know, just American-made goods and equipment. It is promising to see sustained job growth and energy efficiency, and we need to do everything we can to keep that growing. Energy efficiency strengthens small businesses, which we all know are the backbone of the American economy. And according to the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, roughly 70% of energy efficiency jobs are in small businesses. It's clear that energy efficiency opens doors across America. You will find energy efficiency workers in all 50 states and 99.7% of all U.S. counties. Manufacturing and construction jobs deliver good jobs with sustainable wages and benefits for families, and these are the types of jobs that we need more of, to regrow and protect a strong American middle class. And these are a few of the reasons that we need to support building energy efficiency efforts and link them to incentives to create market demand for U.S. products. Utility incentives, government rebates, procurement policies, and product rating systems are all a part of this larger strategy. At Building Clean, we do our part by helping built environment professionals find U.S.-made products. We maintain a public database of over 4,500 U.S. facilities that are manufacturing energy efficiency products and parts across the country. The database can be found and is featured at BuildingClean.org. And on BuildingClean.org, you can find U.S.-made HVAC systems, insulation, lighting, plumbing, roofing, sealants, appliances like we already mentioned, windows, doors, skylights, and even water filtration systems. But you know, revitalizing American manufacturing is not the only thing that energy efficiency can do for this country. The benefits go beyond reducing energy usage, beyond saving money, beyond helping the environment, and beyond creating jobs. But that does sound like a pretty good start. Studies show that health in the built environment are undeniably connected. Billions in health-related costs can be saved through the same work that improves energy efficiency in residential and commercial spaces. In fact, according to the Green and Healthy Homes Initiative, nearly 9 million families across the nation live in unhealthy energy inefficient homes, which leads to $82.4 billion in healthcare costs nationwide. Increasing demand for energy efficiency residential retrofits creates a unique opportunity to simultaneously address energy consumption and improve health outcomes for Americans. Improving the energy efficiency and quality of our built environment empowers Americans to live healthier, more productive lives. Energy efficiency in the built environment can create healthier spaces, reduce energy consumption, and deliver good jobs for Americans. So let's work together to fully realize the potential of the clean energy economy and all of its benefits. And you know, thank you for attending this panel, and I invite you to come visit us at the Building Clean Table. If you have any questions, we'll be here all day. Thank you. And I should also mention that EESI just finished up a jobs fact sheet yesterday, and so that will also be on, you can find it on our table, and Kayla's right there. So many exciting things happening in this space, and it's a terrific opportunity. So we will next here from Adam Goff, who is the Policy Director at Eight Rivers Capital, as well as the Policy Director for NET Power. Thank you Carol for setting up this event and giving us the opportunity to speak today. My name is Adam Goff. I'm the Policy Director for NET Power, and I'm going to talk to you about how we can produce zero-emission electricity from natural gas. To do that first, I'll explain the technology that we used to do this, and then second, I'll talk about what role this can play in the clean energy transition and what role policy can play in helping us cut CO2 emissions faster. So NET Power is a new way of making power from natural gas. Most power plants in this country drive a turbine with steam or with air. NET Power actually turns CO2 from a problem into the solution. We use a CO2 turbine to make power. So NET Power is a joint venture of Exilon, Occidental Petroleum, McDermott, and Eight Rivers Capital, and we invented a new power cycle that first burns natural gas and pure oxygen. The air around us is actually mostly nitrogen, so by taking out the nitrogen, when you burn in pure oxygen, you eliminate all your air pollutants. So there's no NOx and no SOx generated, and you get a pure stream of CO2. Next, we use that CO2 to drive our turbine. So that CO2 is what gives us high efficiency, and at the end of that CO2 pushing the turbine, we have it already purified and captured, so we can store it deep underground in sequestration. So I know many of you have heard about carbon capture. The general challenge is that it's expensive, and you are legally allowed to release your CO2 up in the atmosphere if you so choose. The thing that makes our technology different is that we have no choice but to capture the CO2. Since the CO2 is driving our turbine, there's no additional cost for us to capture it. It's captured inherently as part of our power cycle. So this is a breakthrough in carbon capture and that it makes the marginal cost of capture nothing additional after you built the power plant. So where are we today? We've raised $150 million from our three partners, and we've built our first plant down in Texas. So if you're ever in the Houston area, we have a 50 megawatt plant down right outside of Houston in LaPorte that's demonstrated this technology using that pure oxygen and driving the turbine with CO2. Our next stage in development is building 300 megawatt commercial plants. So we take this technology and we scale it up to 300 megawatts. We've got six or seven plants in development around the world. So that's where net power is going. What role does it play in the clean energy transition? I know many of you here are most familiar with solar power and wind power and renewables, which are our fastest growing clean energy sources. Net power can help balance those renewable energy sources. Right now the U.S. builds many gigawatts of combined cycle gas a year that releases its CO2 into the air. That combined cycle is actually very helpful in balancing renewables for when it's night and the sun goes down or when the wind is variable. We use that combined cycle to balance our more variable renewable energy. Net power can play that same role, but without any air pollution and without any carbon emissions. We can ramp up and we can ramp down and play a balancing role for renewables. And per the gentleman's earlier question on the first panel, we can help decarbonize gas in the power sector. So this very large supply of natural gas the U.S. has discovered through fracking and the Shell Revolution. We can turn that into something that doesn't harm our climate by burning that gas in a clean way. So the U.S. is definitely the best place to build this technology, but we see a global deployment potential. So since we have no additional cost of CO2 capture, we think we can hit the same price as conventional generation. So when we've built five, six, seven of these plants, we are planning to be at the same or lower price point as combined cycle gas or pulverized coal. When you do that, you really change the clean energy conversation. Just like right now solar is at price parity or below with coal or gas. You then see that technology being built out in China and India and countries that don't necessarily have the capital to spare to build more expensive power. Net power can hit that same point where it is economic to deploy it in China regardless of whether they have any price or incentive on CO2. To get there, we do need policy support to build the first couple plants. The U.S. actually in 2018 passed the 45-Q tax credit. This is part of the budget deal in February. It pays you $50 a ton for every ton of CO2 that you sequester underground. That is what's going to allow Net Power to build its first handful of plants and get up to scale. It's a pretty large incentive, so it gets us between $30 and $50 million in revenue a year. So we have the carbon incentive we need to get this technology up to scale. The things we need further to help us utilize that, there's two fixes to 45-Q. One is called the base erosion anti-abuse tax. It's pretty arcane tax details about how 45-Q is treated for certain new tax code elements introduced in tax reform in 2017. The second is called American energy bonds that allows you to split up 45-Q so you can get a more varied investor base in this clean energy projects. Additionally, we're supportive of the carbon capture R&D bills that are currently going through the House and Senate. Senator Cornyn introduced the leading act for natural gas carbon capture and a senator mentioned it also has the effect act, which authorizes carbon capture R&D at Department of Energy. So we think Net Power can play a big role in helping accelerate clean energy and reduce CO2 emissions in the U.S. and around the world. Thank you for your attention. We have a booth at the Expo. If you have any further questions or want to get more into the chemistry of how exactly we're able to do this, please come talk to us. Thank you. Thanks so much. And as you've heard, there are just all sorts of solutions. And as we look at these problems and recognize that they are problems, challenges that we must face, it is totally driving lots of innovation and great new ideas. So we are now going to turn to another company that has been very innovative for years. We are going to hear from Arlen Peters, who is the head of sustainability for Novozymes. Thank you, Carol, for setting this up. Can everyone hear me? Okay. Yeah, okay. So anyway, thank you all for coming today and giving us the opportunity to share our story and also discuss a vision for greener chemistry. So I'm Arlen Peters, as was mentioned. I'm head of sustainability at Novozymes North America. And just a little bit of background on Novozymes in case you haven't heard of us. We're a biotechnology company in the U.S. We're headquartered in North Carolina. And what we do is we find biological tools in nature and we figure out a way to apply those tools to various problems that we see. We are able to produce greener biofuels, for example, improve animal health, reduce water usage in textiles production, and improve the quality of food and the quantity of food that we produce in agriculture. The main tool that we use is something called an enzyme. I don't know, has anyone heard of enzymes before? Yeah, okay, great. I'm seeing some nods. Good, good. For those of you who have not heard of those, you basically need them to live. These are catalysts that we have in our body. They allow us to function every day. In fact, if you are breathing right now, you are using an enzyme that takes CO2 out of your cells and releases it into the air. So really, really amazing stuff. We use these to solve all sorts of problems.  In 2018, we calculated that we were able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 88 million tons. That's about the equivalent of taking 37 million cars off the road for one year. So pretty powerful stuff. But I'm not here to talk to you about just enzymes. What I want to talk to you about are eco-friendly cleaners and detergents. So how many of you here care about the environment? Just a show of hands. All right, good, good. How many of you care about the environment so much that you're willing to buy an eco-friendly green detergent? All right, awesome. Okay, good. Me too. So I know that you all have purchased those green detergents. Chemical detergent manufacturers have noticed this trend too. In fact, 86% of new detergent launches in 2017 were eco-friendly or had eco-friendly claims. So that's great. But the problem is that a lot of times, these detergents don't work so well. So you've probably had the experience of maybe getting your shirt with a dollop of chocolate ice cream, going to wash that shirt, using an eco-friendly detergent, maybe washing in cold water so that you're extra gentle on the environment, and thinking to yourself, man, what a great global citizen I am. Then you look at that shirt and you're like, oh my gosh, that stain is still there, right? So you're not the only one to have noticed that issue. In fact, Consumer Reports in 2017 highlighted that problem, stating that detergents actually that make green claims often haven't delivered the same performance as top-rated detergents. So at Nova Zines, we've taken this as a challenge, right? How do we use our technology to create the most eco-friendly detergent possible while still maintaining performance? And there are several levers that we can pull to do this. First, we want to make as concentrated a detergent as possible, right? Why? Because by increasing concentration, you reduce all sorts of negative issues in the value stream. You're able to use less raw materials, less packaging, less weight in transport, and also less chemicals down the drain. Second, we wanted to try to make a 100% bio-based product so that the ingredients come from renewable resources rather than petroleum. Third, we wanted to use a completely recyclable and ideally bio-based plastic in the bottle. And then finally, we wanted a formulation that could operate super well in cold temperatures, right? Because we know that wash temperatures are probably the biggest lever that you can pull in producing greenhouse gas emissions. So this is the concept that we produced. And I can assure you this is not a hip flask. So didn't take a nip of this before starting my presentation today. So we've cut out all but the essential ingredients. So we've gone from 30 ingredients down to 13. It's 100% bio-based. It's using a plastic that is 100% recyclable. And we hope that in future iterations, it will be able to create a bio-based plastic as well. The best thing about this detergent is that it works as well as top-tier detergents in the marketplace today. So if you want to learn more about it, you can talk to us at our booth outside here. I will mention that all of the ingredients in here are available on the market today. And needless to say, this biological detergent would not have been possible without enterprising companies creating better alternatives to traditional chemistries. Many companies would like to transition to alternatives with the needed functionality of desired health and environmental profiles, but one of the most significant barriers to such transitions is the lack of adequate chemical alternatives. Why is that? Well first, there is no comprehensive approach to research and training in the sustainable chemistry field. Meaning most chemists and chemical engineers graduate without any exposure to sustainable chemistry curriculum. We need to have sustainable chemistry taught in the chemistry curriculum. Second, we need significant focus and research to accelerate the development of more sustainable chemical alternatives. The federal government can support that effort, but while there are existing federal programs that have elements of sustainable chemistry, there is little coordination between agencies and programs to maximize our federal investment in this area. So we believe that with a few changes, we can get more out of the programs that exist. That is why we support the Sustainable Chemistry Research and Development Act of 2018. There is a Senate and a House version of this bill. These bills do not regulate companies or spend additional money, but rather create a coordinating entity within the White House OSTP that will assess the various existing federal R&D programs that touch on sustainable chemistry and identify gaps and overlaps. The bill would also establish an advisory panel made up of business, academic and NGO experts to advise the government on research needs, allowing federal R&D efforts to be better targeted towards market needs. So basically this bill creates better coordination among agencies and programs and allows for the better use of current resources. So feel free to join us and others including the GC3 Sustainable Chemistry Alliance, Procter & Gamble, BASF, the Environmental Working Group and LEGO in supporting this legislation. It's one of the best things we can do to ensure that we have safer, greener alternatives to conventional chemistry. As I said, if you want more information, we're in the foyer. And feel free to take a look at our mighty little 100% bio-based detergent. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, something else that we have a lot of in this country is solid waste. So we are going to now hear from David Biederman, who is the CEO and Executive Director of SWANA, the Solid Waste Association of North America, because here is something that we need to find to treat as a resource. Thank you, Carol. Thank you, Carol. Good morning, everybody. Again, my name is David Biederman. I'm with SWANA, the Solid Waste Association of North America. We're headquartered up in Silver Spring, Maryland. We're an association with more than 10,000 members in the United States and Canada. And we appreciate the opportunity to participate again in this great annual policy forum. And we also have a booth in the foyer around the corner if people would like further information about what the association does. So SWANA's members work in both the private sector for companies that you may have heard of like Waste Management, as well as for hundreds of local governments all over the United States, such as the New York City Department of Sanitation, or here in D.C., the District of Columbia's Department of Public Works. So when you put your trash or recyclables out on the street in a container, it's one of our members who probably picks it up. So what I'm going to talk about here today is recycling and the potential role that the federal government can have in supporting this important activity that millions of Americans do every day. But like the prior speaker, I want to take a little test here, ask some questions. How many of you think recycling is important? Raise your hand. I see two people who didn't raise their hand. How many of you have read something recently that recycling is in trouble or there's something going on with recycling? Okay, most of the room, that's terrific. So you're well versed in what the current situation is. Recycling programs in the United States, they face serious challenges right now. Now it's not collapsing contrary to some of the articles you might have read in the newspaper we're seeing on the Internet. It's true that a handful of towns have eliminated curbside recycling and a slightly larger number of local governments have narrowed the types of materials that they're willing to accept in recycling. Oftentimes they're taking out what we call low value plastic, the very thin plastic out of recyclables. But every day, thousands of trucks all across the country are collecting recyclables from homes and businesses. So what caused the current problems we're having with recycling? So two years ago China announced that it was going to stop taking recyclables from the United States and from other countries as part of China's broader effort to improve the environment for their citizens. This matters here in the United States because at least one third of all the recyclables that are generated here in the country used to be sent over to China. And after China imposed its restrictions in early 2018, a lot of recovered paper and plastic began showing up in Southeast and Asian countries like Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. These countries don't have the infrastructure for managing these materials properly. So they began to restrict the import of this material as well. And in fact some of you might have read that several nations in the region have started to send back containers of waste and recyclables to Canada and Australia among others claiming that there's too much trash mixed in with the recycling. This trash, which we refer to in the industry as contamination, is a very important part of this story. So as a result of this disruption in the marketplace, the value of the recovered paper and plastic generated at recycling facilities all across the United States has declined by at least 50% over the past two years. And recyclables are worth even less when they're heavily contaminated. Now Americans continue to recycle with great fervor. We do a lot of recycling, but they often put the wrong material in that blue recycling bin. Generally 15 to 25% of the material that's processed at a recycling facility is contamination. It ends up at a landfill. You'd be surprised at what people put in the recycling bin. Dirty diapers, hoses, Christmas trees, plastic bags, batteries, and electronics.  So SWANA and others are educating Americans on how to recycle right, but it's a national problem that requires federal assistance. So how can the federal government help? So we're working with the United States Environmental Protection Agency to develop a national framework on recycling, which is going to be released on November 15th as part of America Recycles Day. The national framework is going to focus on four key areas, education and outreach, developing more domestic markets for recyclables, improving the recycling infrastructure here in the United States, and identifying the proper metrics and measurements to use to determine whether recycling programs are performing well. But Congress also has an opportunity to provide leadership on recycling. SWANA is part of a broad-based coalition requesting congressional funding to support local recycling programs. Specifically, we're seeking support for the Recover Act, which would provide money to local governments and others to educate Americans on how to recycle right, help them upgrade outdated recycling equipment, and develop new markets. The overwhelming majority of Americans want to recycle and are even willing to pay a little bit more for the service. But there isn't sufficient domestic capacity to manage all the paper, plastic, metal and glass that we generate. And as I mentioned earlier, Americans need some help in recycling right. And if you don't believe me, check the recycling bin at Union Station for what I'm talking about. Congress can encourage additional investment and improve the recycling system here in the United States through the Recover Act. Now, recycling is a non-partisan issue. There isn't a democratic way or a Republican way to collect and process recyclables. And recycling is good for the economy. It creates jobs here in the United States and needed tax revenue, billions of dollars in tax revenue. But it's also good for the environment as recycling means we don't have to cut down more trees to make more paper or mine more ore to make more cans. And it also preserves landfill space for what's really needed to go to disposal, like those dirty diapers. And it reduces greenhouse gas emissions. The small investment that the Recover Act would authorize would be a win-win for both the economy and the environment. Lastly, earlier this year, an international treaty known as the Basel Convention was amended. This would require exporting countries to provide prior notification if their shipping recovered plastic to importing countries. This amendment is going to take effect in January of 2021 and was enacted in response to the growing marine litter problem. It's going to significantly restrict access to foreign markets for recycled plastic. This just adds additional pressure to the need to improve our domestic recycling systems. Some action is already taking place. Companies are making plans to only use recycled content by 2025 or 2030. And some states and local governments are passing laws to try to address these situations. And we are seeing some improvement in the contamination rates in a handful of jurisdictions, including right here in the District of Columbia. But it's not enough. A great deal of adaptation and change is needed in a short period of time. So as I said, this is a national problem that requires federal action. And I want to end by quoting from a letter that was actually in the trade publication yesterday from the US EPA to Congressman, Congressperson Haley Stevens in response to her concern around recycling. The letter states that no one organization has the resources necessary to address all the challenges to our materials recovery system. So significant progress requires collective action. That collective action will take place with federal assistance and be successful. Thank you very much. Thank you very, very much. We will all do our best to try harder. But I think one of the things that has been so important about messages coming from everybody here and from the previous panel too, is how important the role of policy is that policy does matter. And that there is an important role for many, many different players, stakeholders. And that includes the whole role of our elected officials and our government entities. So thank you for raising all of those important points. So our last speaker on this panel is Devin McCacken, who is the Senior Policy Advisor for Federal Affairs with ITC Holdings Corporation. And that company is part of WIRES, and WIRES has a booth over in the expo. Good morning, everybody, and thanks to Carol for that introduction. As she mentioned, my name is Devin McCacken. I work for a company called ITC Holdings. That is, of course, an anonymous corporate acronym. So what it stands for is International Transmission Company. I'm very pleased to be here today on behalf of the WIRES Coalition to discuss this topic of sustainability. And for those who aren't familiar with WIRES, what we are is a nonprofit coalition of electric utilities, regional transmission organizations, and some technology companies. And our chief concern is to address all of the many policy issues that impact the electric power transmission system. And there are many, so we stay very, very busy with that. But for those of you who may not be familiar at all with the role of electric transmission in the power system, and there's no shame in that, those are basically the really big electric wires that you see by the freeway a lot of times. And what they do is they carry power from where it's generated to where people use it. And a lot of times that happens over very long distances. So what I'd like to do today is to try to address the topic of sustainability through the prism of the electric grid. And to take a look at where we stand as far as the transition to renewable power. But more importantly, think about where do we need to go from here to keep up the momentum. And hopefully I'm doing it through a prism or an angle that you don't always hear when you hear about sort of broad national climate policies. The grid often doesn't come up, but it really should. And that's what I'll be arguing today. So I'll start at a really high level. I think we all know that the topic of climate change is really rising in people's consciousness and in the consciousness of policymakers. We're seeing demands that are growing for some really aggressive policies that really rise to the challenge of this issue that we're facing. And when we talk about climate, there's basically two major sectors of the U.S. economy that are and have been the main emitters of carbon in the U.S. And those are of course the electric power sector where I'm from and that comes from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, natural gas. And then secondly, there's the electric transportation sector. So when we drill down on the electric power sector, there is a lot of good news to report, actually, happily. And that is over the last 15 years or so, we've started to see a really rapid decarbonization of the sector. A lot of old coal generation has been replaced, mostly by renewables like wind and solar. So that's been great. And it's been driven by a number of things. Of course, we've had public policies at the federal and state level, renewable portfolio standards at the states, tax credits for renewable technologies, things like that. But it's also been driven by economics, of course, as the cost of renewables has gone down and just advancements in the technology. But more recently what we've seen, which is also very encouraging, is increasing demands from consumers for renewable power and also corporations. So utilities have responded by saying, some strong commitments to move to renewables. One utility in the Midwest just announced they're going to go 100% renewable by 2050. So that's been great. So what I'll argue, though, is that a lot of what we've accomplished and a lot of what we're going to depend on going forward is our ability to invest in a robust, nationally integrated electric transmission system. So most don't know it, but that's now what we have now. We have a local and a regional transmission system that grew that way organically over the years. But what we're going to need to move to is much more of a regionally integrated grid that can move the power from where it is to where it needs to be. And that's because most of the renewable resources that are really cheap that we have in this country and we have a lot are located in the middle of the country where it's hard to access them and we just don't have the grid infrastructure right now to do that. So to get more specific about that, right now in the middle of the country today we have a situation where there's actually a huge backlog of renewable projects that are waiting to get on the grid. So these are conceptual stage projects where developers want to move forward, but they simply can't because the wires capacity just isn't there. And as long as that situation persists, you're going to have a power system that relies more on fossil fuels than it probably needs to. So I come from Michigan and I used to live in Wisconsin and there there's a grid organization that oversees the whole transmission grid. It's called MISO. And there's such a backlog of renewable projects there that it might take as long as 10 years just to plan out the system to figure out what wires we need and how to get those online to help those projects get out of the queue. So my argument in short is that the next great hurdle in sustainability and in climate policy is going to be a massive upgrade to our electric transmission grid, which will help to bring these projects online and it will help to do it at the lowest possible cost to facilitate the transition to renewables. We also have to make sure it's done in a resilient way. So the more renewables you have on the system, the more wires you need to be able to when the wind isn't blowing somewhere or the sun's shining somewhere else, but the wires are the way that you make all that work together. So I wanted to point to just at least one example of how this has worked really well in the past and that's from somewhere that might be surprising to some and that's Texas. So about 20 years ago, Texas realized that they had a really great wind resource and the problem they had is that it was located in the north and the west part of the state where no one lives. The people live on the east side of the state for the most part. So what they decided to do, because they had this chicken and egg problem of no grid but lots of wind, is build the grid first and then use that to help facilitate the interconnection of that wind. For lack of a better analogy, I'll call it the field of dreams type policy. If you build it, they will come, and we'll be building the grid, they being renewables. It turned out to be wildly successful and Texas quickly became a national leader in wind output. So if I will leave you with one message today, it's that when we talk about climate policies like carbon tax, the things you hear about all the time and that get a lot of debate, we really need to include in that first tier of policies a grid first investment strategy to integrate as many renewables as possible as cheaply as possible. We're going to take a lot of policy alignment at the federal and the state level. It's very complicated to get transmission built, but we do need to be more proactive about it and we need to do it really yesterday to get all this to work together the way we need it to be. So I'm going to stop there. Wires, I know, has a booth. I don't have handouts up here, but they have plenty of handouts and our website has lots of great studies and information about how transmission plays a role in sustainability and the renewable transition. Thanks so much, Devin. We have worked quite a lot with Wires before and if any of you are interested, we have done a number of briefings that are on our website so that you can learn more about that. One of the things I think is so important is there's so much talk up here about infrastructure and so it's really important to remember that the grid is a really, really critical piece of this country's infrastructure in terms of how things run, work, whatever so we just always need to be aware of that and so there's lots of exciting things going on in that whole sector as well. We have a few minutes so we can take a few questions. Okay, go ahead. Just wait for the microphone. This is for Adam Gough. I'm wondering, I think I hadn't heard of net power before but I think it sounds really fascinating and I'm wondering, although the power solution in itself won't result in emissions which is fantastic, obviously fracking in itself causes a lot of environmental issues so I'm wondering how the net power solution more broadly speaking might address the environmental problems that come with fracking like the risk of earthquakes, water contamination with chemicals, things like that. That's a great question and something we do think a lot about but it's also a challenge for us because we don't source our own gas so I think the burden on us is to find the most responsible source of natural gas for our projects. We do think a lot of the issues with natural gas which are certainly real can be solved where you can get natural gas out of the ground and you don't have to inject it and cause that earthquake problem we're seeing in Oklahoma. I think methane leaks are a huge issue and I care a lot about climate change and we shouldn't be leaking CH4 into the atmosphere. Additionally when we buy natural gas we're buying CH4 so there's also an economic incentive there if we don't leak that methane we can actually use more of it in our project so there are real challenges as a producer of power we will do our best to solve them and also think that we can be have the lowest emissions of any natural gas power I think for all of us who work in energy every single energy source has challenges and so we're always working through those challenges but by eliminating the air emissions and the CO2 emissions we think we can be a responsible citizen and a clean producer of power. Other questions? Okay, I see a hand clear in the back. Can you just wait for the microphone please? Thanks. A question for the gentleman from SWANA. Can you talk about the policy landscape for incentives to encourage either reuse of specific materials or material science to develop new products using and use materials from recycling processes? Sure, there's a patchwork of incentives across different states to encourage reuse of material there are take back programs in certain states but there's no federal law or regulation in this space there's an EPA and Department of Agriculture policy on food waste but that's sort of separate from what I think you're talking about the patchwork that we have is part of the problem and I talked specifically about recycling and part of the problem is that over the last decade or so we forgot that the hierarchy is reduce, reuse, recycle recycles last we need to reduce our waste output we need to reuse the things that we're doing in some sort of circular kind of way and then recycle as best we can. Good question. You've probably been reading a lot also in terms of circular economy I think there's more and more conversations about that. Julie. Hold on, Julie just wait a second. Okay, there you go. Hi, thank you everybody. Those are great presentations. This question is for Novozymes. I wonder if you could just speak briefly to the work that's going on in your sector on using a wood based feedstock for ever placement for plastic products. It's a really good question. I know that there have been a number of efforts to try to find sustainable sources of raw material that can go into making biobased plastics and we have been involved in a number of efforts to produce the technology that can convert things like sustainably slurred sugars or woody biomass and convert those into sugars that can then be converted into biobased plastics. There are a number of plant based plastics out there plant based PET for example but I would say at the moment a lot of those alternatives are somewhat more expensive than current plastics or petroleum based plastics and it's really incumbent on the industry to try to improve those economics. I think there's a lot of activity in R&D for a variety of players. I know the US government has funded a number of projects through USDA so I'm hopeful that we'll get to a point where some of these things are cost competitive to the alternative. I would just encourage you and Julie to follow up because Julie's with the Forest Service and they are looking once again all sorts of issues with regard to thinking about how we can approach a more circular economy that can solve multiple problems all at the same time which is also really exciting, right? Other questions? Okay, we'll do one here and one here and then that will be it. Thank you everyone for coming. I love the diversity of solutions across the board, whether it be wind, carbon dioxide, chemical enzymes, recyclables. One source of energy that I'm curious about and this is for the panel whether it be policy barriers or whether you see innovations taking place is nuclear energy. So I'm thinking the sun is a clean source of energy. It's fusion from hydrogen to helium. Is there any research going in? And I understand nuclear energy also has the radioactivity contention with it but from your aspects as professionals in this field, any comments on that? Okay, thank you. Does anybody want to talk to that? I'm out of my depth here but there is an advanced nuclear industry in the U.S. Congress passed 45J which provides incentives for advanced nuclear. I'd recommend looking into new scale or TerraPower or Oklo or three of those advanced nuclear companies. I won't pretend to have the nuclear chemistry background to tell you how they work but there are solutions to reducing the waste from nuclear generation and third-gen nuclear plants. And I might just mention obviously the focus of the expo and the forum is on efficiency and renewable related technologies and I would also be happy to talk to you a little bit further afterwards. Okay, we have a question over here. Thank you. My name is Roy O'Neill and I'm mostly with the Forest Service, R&D Forest Products. So we deal with a lot of these things that are so called green and sustainable. So I guess one of the questions we've always had in mind that when we designed these research projects how much value does green sustainability actually bring to a product? It's at the interface of technology and policy. When we look at it, a lot of these products consider green and sustainable. It's actually because they have special properties that customers need, not necessarily because they're green and sustainable. There's always going to be a small group of customers that want something that's green, regardless. We need to sacrifice some of the property performance properties. So I guess I just want to hear first hand from people here in the farm industry. What's your take on that? Is this property, performance property to bring the green aspect of a product to the buyers? Ultimately, you're here to make money not make products, right? Yeah, I'll say something to that. So that was actually 100% behind our thinking for trying to produce an eco-friendly detergent that actually works because we know that customers often aren't willing to sacrifice the performance or the quality of products for green attributes. There is, as you said, a small segment of the population that's willing to do that. In fact, it's kind of funny. We were talking to one of our customer's seventh generation. Their CEO came down to talk to our employees and he was telling us about how people love their products. In fact, one of their customers told him that, you guys, I loved your product even before it worked. But that's not good enough and they recognize that and so they want to make sure that you can have both worlds and I think the effort now is really to try to find both the performance and also the green attributes. And I would add to that that there's a growing percentage of the population that places a higher emphasis on the sustainable nature of the product than 10 years ago, 20 years ago, et cetera. And so what we see is we see a lot of research being done and how to build better material. We actually did a conference call with Argonne National Labs earlier this week about a research project they're doing with regard to doing something with all the plastic, right? And it's going to take research and it's going to take a lot of engineering that's way above my brain power to create, you know, something like this that's recyclable in all curbside programs throughout the United States. This is not a recyclable cup, right? It says it's compostable. We've been working with paper for centuries. It goes to the right place under the right circumstances. So we have a lot to do and there's a definite role for the federal government here in being a leader and thank you to your department for the role you guys are playing. Thank you so much for your work and we need to empower them to do a lot more in this whole space and if you would also note this also links right back into thinking about the kinds of economic activity and jobs that Kayla was talking about as well. So I want to thank you all very, very much for being here and to all of our speakers and for putting forward some very, very thoughtful questions and please go visit these folks in terms of their booths and conversations because that's how we're all going to make a difference. So thank you all very, very much.


It's time to make Apple Cider. So I am running apples through my grinder, which is a oak drum with little teeth on it that run apples through a smaller and smaller gap. And I have to push them through because this isn't perfectly designed. This is something I'm gonna be rebuilding next year, but for this year, it's functioning, so I'm not gonna stop it. This is run, it could be run by bicycle, but it's actually being run by electric motor right now just for easy quickness of getting it done. And so I'm putting through about a bushel of apples at a time, a little under a bushel of apples, to fill up a five gallon bucket of pumice. Pumice is ground apples. And then I'm gonna take that inside. What I have to do is get this five gallons of pumice or shredded apple into this empty bottom, it's kind of like a bucket, but it's got open sides. So at the bottom, I've got this piece of wood with cutout. So the, any trapped sap on the top side of this can drain out. So that's kind of like a drainage board. And different pieces of fabric that kind of hold all the pumice in from squishing out of the slats. Each separated by a couple of different pieces of wood to help distribute the pressure a little better. If you didn't have those, just the top would get pressed and the bottom would still say pretty soggy. This allows the pressure to be distributed better. And that will all run out into a collection bucket. And then I will pasteurize it and make apple juice. And I will also kick in some yeast to a large carboy to make some hard cider for later. So, so here we go. My friend of mine in Madison who had built this in the 19, was it 30 years ago in a shop class and just never used it. So I mounted it to this and put a handle on it. And now, through the wonder of physics, et cetera, et cetera, I can exert quite a lot of pressure down on here. I have about a gallon out now. I expect another gallon and a half, if not two gallons out of this five gallons of pumice. So about half of this volume is liquid. I get my two and a half gallons. So I got a gallon here, a gallon here and a half gallon here. And I put them in pots with water. And then this water will be brought up to 75 degrees Celsius, about 170 degrees Fahrenheit. Once the internal temperature of this liquid reaches 170 or 75, I start a timer for 20 minutes. It pasteurizes for that time. At the end of the 20 minutes, I clean the lid, put it back on, and they're sealed. And then they sit and cool down. And they should be shelf stable for a half year to a year. Today we're continuing the cider making. And here I've got my press. I've got press full of apples, three different cheeses. They're called cheeses when you make a bundle of apples and press them. And then in here, I've already pressed one bucket full. I've got about three gallons out of that. And so this is a six gallon carboy. So I'm about to pitch my yeast. And this is just an active dry wine yeast. And luckily I had some still on hand. But next year, I don't know quite what I'm gonna do because I'm not gonna be able to order more yeast, right? So I might have to wash and save some of this yeast. Might also try and save some of it as brewer's yeast. We'll see how that goes. But so there's different ways to pitch this. I'm just pitching it directly and right before I do a press. And then all that yeast will get incorporated as everything drips through. I'm also gonna add, I mean, while I've got it, yeast nutrient because cider doesn't have quite everything that yeast needs to be happy. So I add a teaspoon of yeast nutrient per gallon. One, two, three. I have a little helper here, four, five. And this is food grade urea. And if you know anything about urine, urea comes from urine. So I could in theory make my own. Next year, we'll cross that bridge and we come to it. So now I'm going to run the press and get some more juice in here. Yeah, and he is worse than a wasp because he's got hand and he can move these things around. So I have to keep him at bay while I press this. Uh-uh, he is very interested in all the apple juice. Yesterday we pressed gallons and gallons of cider or of unfiltered apple juice that I pasteurized and saved in bottles. And now I'm working on the hard cider. And he's still very interested in what kid doesn't love gallons and gallons of apple juice. This is about chickens. Give our chickens diabetes with all this sugar. Diabetic chickens. So one problem I was talking about is that I don't have access to more yeast. And so if I needed to, I could harvest yeast. And this is washed yeast. And so essentially, what I'm able to do is at the bottom of my fermentation tank, a lot of the pectin and the yeast will settle out to the bottom and create what are called leaves. It's sediment, it just sits there. And in the bottom, above it, there will be an active zone of yeast. And so what happens is when I have one of these car boys full and I'm ready to decant it and let it settle out, I can pull off all the top stuff and leave that bottom inch. And then when I draw that bottom inch out, leaving as much sediment behind as I can, then I can pour some distilled water in there, shake it around. In this case, I'm using reverse osmosis water because I don't know, just a little water. And then this could be a third of this could have been poured into each of the car boys. And that would have brought active yeast into the new cider to promote fermentation. But because I still have some good purchase yeast, I'm using that. But once I run out, I'll be switching to washed yeast. Yes, yes, you're very chatty. All right, now I'm down in the basement and it's January and I've got a whole bunch of different casks here with my different ciders. So here's a cider from that you just saw being pressed and here's another cider. Over here is a grape wine that I made in a previous video. And here are some other ciders. So these are all ciders, they're just kind of sitting here waiting to be moved into secondary fermentation. So basically they fermented in these containers and now I'm gonna take them out and put just the cider and leave all these leaves or the remaining the remaining yeast and leave that out. And then up here, you can see a variety of bottles. We have mead and cider and other things from previous years. So after they've sat for a while, then we'll be putting them into these empty bottles and then they'll just age. Generally my mead has to age for at least nine months. My cider depends on the cider. Some ciders drinkable in six months and some needs a year and a half. So it really depends. But yeah, looking pretty good going into the winter with lots of cider for drinking, which is kind of nice. I thought it was time to do a little bit of an update because it is midwinter now. And this was completely full of jars going into the summer or going into the winter. We're still doing pretty well. We have plenty of pickles. We have quite a bit of honey. We're starting to get down on our maple syrup. Our jams are doing okay and we're about halfway through our tomatoes and it's January. So we're going to do okay going into the spring. Eventually once we start running out of tomatoes our soups will be less exciting. But we do have lots of potatoes. So let's go look at those. So over here in the hurricane door that comes down to our basement, we have lots of potatoes in boxes. We are in milk crates. We have one, two, three, four milk crates left of potatoes, not to mention all of our carrots that you saw me putting in sand, cold Robbie turnips. We're doing real well on the root vegetable crops. And that's not to mention that we have lots of squash still remaining. We probably have a dozen or so of these Long Island cheese squash. These are my favorite. They store really long. This will be good well into March, April. And then here in these crates we've got apples. And I picked this apple in September. And yeah, I've got some spots on it but it's totally edible. Great for pies, all those sorts of things. And then down here we have sweet potatoes and more apples. So we're doing pretty well. Not to mention I have a dozen quarts of apple sauce still. I barely even touched that. So that's, and then grain wise I see one, we probably have about four bushels of grain left. I originally made nine bushels of grain. So we're a little about halfway through our grain supply. And that will be replenished in July. So we're doing okay. And finally over here we have our store bought stuff. This is the things that we can't replenish. We've still got, let's see each of those is three pounds of salt. We've still got 18 pounds of salt. We've got a couple quarts of olive oil. We've got a couple gallons of cooking oil, olives, peas, oh, quite a lot of legumes. So like lentils and peas and beans and other kind of snacky things. We do a little bit of store bought pasta, bullion, peppercorns, you know, we got a little odds and ends. We're doing pretty well coming into February. And the spring is generally the hungry time. And so that's when we would start to imagine that we were gonna be having trouble. But really we're sailing through. We will have problems though in terms of cooking oil. That's gonna be our Achilles heel. We don't have a way to make cooking oil. We don't have animals to make dairy, to make butter or other types of oil or fat. So really oil is going to be our Achilles heel. Another thing that we're missing is onions. We ran out of onions. My onions just didn't grow enough. I didn't grow enough of them. So we've been having to put cut up cold Robbie and cook that with onion powder before we do a soup instead of onions and that works okay. Gives us some onion flavor, but it's not the same. So I'm looking forward to having onions. And it's one of the first things I've started in the garden already at the end of January. I already have onions growing.


So comparing detangling tools, this is very old hair. This is a weak old wash and go and I use Ekka style gel to help set this wash and go so it is very dry. I'm going to be showing you several different detangling tools. We have detangling brushes, wooden combs, we have shower combs, an afro pick and of course you can detangle using your fingers.  Now I do have several videos on detangling natural hair that I will be linking in the cards. So I will be using neck beheaded helpers DIY pre-poo which I also have a video on that to help detangle my hair, good old water and of course coconut oil. So let's get started by lightly misting my hair with water. It's just going to help my hair hydrate it, it's going to allow me to be able to section it off easier and avoid minimal breakage, that's what we're looking for, okay. And I'm going to turn around to the back to show you guys the shrinkage. Oh yes, this is what we're working with. So again, I'm going to go ahead and section off my hair in a section, in a second excuse me. And what I'm basically going to do is use a different detangling tool for four different sections of my hair, okay. All sections and when it comes to a wash and go, sometimes it can be a little tedious to detangle. However, I feel like since my ends were basically, since I really did a number on my ends and had to get it corrected, the detangling process itself was not that bad. So what you saw me do here is apply some coconut oil and I rarely now use coconut oil as a leave in. I mostly use it to help me with detangling my hair. Felicia Leatherwood brush and the Felicia Leatherwood detangling brush and the Afro pick took the longest when it came to detangling my hair, when it came to ease of use, which I'll get into detail towards the end of this video. I feel like the shower comb, excuse me, I'm so sorry, the wooden comb actually was easier to use as far as the handle goes, the grip goes and all of that. I have another shower comb that you guys saw at the beginning of this clip that is easier to use than the one that I showed you, but I feel like most people, if they're going to use a shower comb, they're going to use one similar to what I used in this particular video. All right, you guys, so final verdict. This could be a bit difficult because again, I think that detangling your hair depends on what current state your hair is in. I'm detangling it on a wash and go like I stated earlier, my hair is dry because I use ecostallogel. I'm not canceling ecostallogel and I think it also depends on the products you are using, whether you're detangling it inside or outside of the shower. I rarely detangle in the shower unless I have pre-pooled my hair for a certain number of hours. If I detangle in the shower, I typically use this, the Felicia Leatherwood comb. It works perfectly. However, I found that with the Felicia Leatherwood comb, I can't really get at my roots. So overall, my best would have to be the wooden comb and second, it would be a shower comb. It could be any type of shower comb. I also like this particular shower comb that is a double tooth that I purchased on Amazon. Like I said, I have other stuff here, the denim brush, no. Now I heard that T is that there's another type of brush, but yeah, no. It's great for defining curls when you have shorter hair. When I had a TWA, I loved that, but now that it's longer, yeah. So yes, it would be in between these. When I had medium-length to short hair, the Afro pick was great for me. But yeah, wooden comb, runner up, shower comb, now. So yes, that is it. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Let me know if you tried any of these tools. Yeah, fingers first, and then wooden comb, a shower comb. And that is it, you guys. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you as always, so all our new subscribers, take care, bye.


Hello all. I'm Heiki, co-founder and CEO of Hapionaut, and in the next 15 minutes I'm going to tell you how we are using equity to get motivation levels higher. But just before that, a few words about companies like what we are doing in case you haven't seen our service before. So we are providing service for roughly 5000 customers so that they know real time how happy customers are in their locations. So we have like many retail customers, many service customers, roughly 200 airports which are using our service. But like before I tell more about like how we are serving the equity and also like why we are doing that. We have like few rules what we have agreed together with the owners and let's start with those. So the first one is that like we think that no one is able to do success stories alone. It's not only like the founder or like few founders or few people, it's basically like teamwork. So because of this, we think that the success will be also shared with like big group of people. And that's like number one rule what we are having. Then like second thing what we agreed together with the other shareholders is that like it doesn't make sense for us to work in the board of directors position. Because like we all know that there are people who are like focusing on that. They know how to create like how to support like long term plans, what kind of things are critical for companies to make like success stories. So for that reason we agreed that let's make always sure that we have best possible people there. And actually like last year we got award here in Finland that we had best board of directors team in Finland. So no employees, no one from the like employees are part of the board. Then the third thing. So this is also like one critical that like we want to make sure that like no one as an owner can justify their opinions or decisions. So basically like it means that on the operational level like owners don't have any special rights. And the reason why we wanted to do this was that like we want to give the space for the employees. So that they feel that like they have room and they can tell about their ideas about the things what could make company more successful. And the fourth thing what we agreed was that during the first years actually like basically in first two years we didn't get any salaries. So all the money what we got in we were basically using that money to develop our product father. And to make sure that it works for the customer and it's creating the value what we are thinking that it should create. But after two years we started to get salaries and the salaries were like from at first I think it was like 200 euros, 500 euros, 1000 euros. And we all had same salaries. So at this point we had roughly 10 people at happy or not. And almost everyone was a shareholder and with the low salary. Like having like it would have feel like weird to discuss with other shareholders that hey like I'm having like 300 euros salary. And you are having like 350 euros salary getting like 50 euros more. So like we were thinking like that just doesn't make sense. But then about the about like how we are actually serving the equity. And like I was thinking that it would be like it would be maybe maybe like interesting to hear some stories about how how like how companies are actually doing that. So when we started the business we were basically giving shares. So we were thinking that okay should we give like stock options or what the structure should be. But because like like all of us know the shares those are the ones which are kind of like the most valuable thing. And because of that we agreed that hey let's give shares. So the people who came first they got more people who became later they got a little bit less. But still like we were always giving the shares. And after like after six years we changed the model. And this is roughly at the same time when we started cooperation with investor called No Show. So basically in past two years we have been we have had like several employee stock option plan in place. And what it means is that we are giving stock options. And here you can see the structure like how how we have built up that. So basically the stock options are kind of like free for the employees. Of course those stock options has to have certain like strike price. Like that's the way how it has to be done because of the taxation. And then we have like like total of four year wasting time. So what does that mean is that like if someone is getting let's say like three stock options. So with a one year cliff like during the first year you are getting like basically zero stock options. But during the second year you get one third year one and on fourth year you get one stock stock option. So after four years you have like four stock options. And after that period you can also like purchase those shares. And if the person leaves you lose the right to the stock options. That's the program what we have in place right now. And then about like how we are how we are like sharing this. So this like kind of like the roughly numbers so that you can you can like get idea that how like how we have been doing this. So like roughly like equal part with the founders, with the VC and also with the other employees. So then about like what's the great thing like when like having large ownership space. And like these are these are the things what we have seen happening. And the first one I think like this may be the most critical. So having like better customer experience. So like one story I think like it was our second year when we got like like pretty big customer from the Sweden. They have roughly 70 locations and they took our service for all locations. And they still our customer. And like during that time we just got our service up and it wasn't like too stable yet. So we had like issues with with like few customers. Also with these Swedish customers we noticed after one month that actually like we lost connection to all those terminals what we are having out there. So I was like oh no like our biggest customer they have issue with our service and so what will happen now. And like we have the data is something like where we are focusing most so most of the people are focusing on the data. But we have one guy who is also focusing on the hardware part and making sure that it works. So that person came to me and told that hey like we have this issue.  And that's something what happened. And I was like wow that's that's amazing like if that person wouldn't have the shares of the company like would he have done that. I don't think so. So I think like that's that's one like that's like one great benefit. Then like happier employees of course like when when like your basically almost your whole team is other shareholders. So it's kind of like it's kind of like common thing that hey let's make sure that we also we kind of like we make money but we also have fun here. So so and and with the bigger group big group of owners it's easier to tell people that hey like happy employees it's like like all of us can contribute on that. It's not only like let's say like HR people. So if I'm not happy I go to HR person that hey can you can you do something. I'm not happy now. It's like all of all of us are responsible for that. And that's easier when you have many shareholders. Change management is easier. So so of course like like the owners they like like they like to it's like critical to get company running. And during the first years that's the kind of like journey what what like like all starts up startups are going on that hey how we make this works. And and and we all know that you have to use like a lot of changes to make things happen. And when you have like a lot of shareholders doing the changes is actually like way easier because always the changes about how we get this actually work. Faster problem solving. This is something what we have seen. And I think like this is this is basically because people are just like spending more time and they are like thinking more not only like between 8 a.m. And 4 p.m. About like how how we could solve these issues. So it's also like people are like like sending slack messages during the like evening hours or during the weekend. Hey like we have this issue and now I maybe got like great idea that how we could solve this. And those people are of course sharing those ideas with other people. That's that's I think that's that's definitely helping helping companies and has been helping us also like a lot more ideas about how company could perform better. So this basically relate to this previous topic. So when we like like we have of course like certain goals certain like yearly goals certain like long term goals. So people are thinking about those targets and thinking about like how we can get there. So so like and having this kind of like open environment where it's not only about the owner but it's about everyone like companies getting much more great ideas about how to make this success. Then the next thing so so usually like like maybe there are startups and success stories where people haven't been working a lot but at least in our case that's not the case so it's like creating the success story. It also means that like you have to do quite a lot of stuff actually like a lot of stuff and to make things successful. Like sometimes it means like really long days and it can be like during the first years it also meant that like sometimes working like Saturdays sometimes working Sundays. That was something what we were doing to make to make that success happen better quality. I think like this is related to like when you are when you are building house for yourself you you maybe focus more on the quality. But if you are if you are like just building houses for other people then then then the quality is not maybe like so like top high priority. So that's kind of like one great thing what we have seen when having large ownership base and the last one flexible cost structure. And that's something like that's creating like when let's say that you have like actually like maybe like story about the previous company not like happy or not. We were in gaming business before so so we had roughly 40 employees and we had the situation where we had only 600 euros on our bank account. So the cost level was like like here and we had like very little money left. And we knew that we are going to this is going to be situation will be like much better but isn't going to be in the following days or following two weeks. It's going to be better in about one month two months. And like what we did basically with the same like large ownership structure is that like we like we were discussing together with with the owners. And we had we had like I was telling a tale like this is the situation of what we are having. And this is now like like really tricky. But like one option what we could do is that instead of paying salaries this month we pay those salaries after two months. And how does that sound. And I was like I didn't know I didn't know of course like what's the risk response will be. But the people were like of course like if that's something what we have to do of course we do that to save the company. And that's what we did. And the situation was fixed. And actually like like from that's like really scary situation after one year we sold company with like many many many millions. So I think that was all. I hope you learned something new about how to share equity and what kind of benefits it can be. And I hope you have had great great time here at great last event. Thank you.


So welcome everyone, I'm quite glad to be here, I enjoy the conference very much, I hope you do enjoy it at least as much as I do, it's been a while since my last time. My name is Georgie, I'm a developer at SAP and also I'm a Bulgarian and also I'm a member of the garden team. So if I should only use one word, I'm a bull gardener. My name is Tom, I'm also a software engineer on the garden team and I work at Pivotal. Cool, today we're going to talk about how did our garden grow during the past year or so, I'm going to risk using this thing, everybody says it's not working, let's see. It really is, oh it is working. So today we're going to tell you a bit of history, then we're going to talk about the cool new stuff that we've been building during the last year and we're going to finish off with a short glimpse of our short and future plans. So we know that you normally expect juice on the garden project of the e-talk, right? So we plan like not turning you down on this one. There you go, juice. A bit of history, history of containers in the context of garden and cloud foundry, where did it all begin, I guess, it all began with the ideas of running with portability and isolation and these are quite hot topics in today's smooth down cloud world, but these ideas are relatively old, like a short Google search revealed that they date back to at least the 1970s with languages like small talk, running on different platforms, in different environments and the truth is called in the 70s and then if you fast forward 40 years of history, there is cloud foundry and it's the platform that we know and love and cloud foundry is all about running multi-tenant applications and doing so securely so it has genuine interest of the topics of portability and isolation and when that thing got released, the most hot, like the hottest technology around isolation where these little links kernel features called namespaces and cgroups and what these gave you was the ability of unsharing different aspects of your processes so that they can run without knowing about one another and without stepping on each other's toes and cloud foundry loved that so it created project warden and this is the great grandparent of garden and warden it was a small Ruby project and it orchestrated the low-level details giving you giving the platform the ability to do this thing and run the apps securely and so on then we decided to rewrite warden and we did garden like you probably know that any name that doesn't start with the g is not a valid name in the golang land you know so warden became garden but it was actually more than just swapping one letter for the other we extracted the garden api which is a small api describing the platform needs what the platform needs to be able to do and then you could have these swappable backends swappable implementations of the api which is great and this this was a really good move it really paid off in the future you'll see and then what's next oh my god docker then docker was released and changed the world i changed the world of containers please why was that so why was it so such a big deal well mainly because it gave you this killer UX this really revolutionary way of working with containers because container technology is complex it's really hard for real users to kind of work with these things and it will be fair to say that docker invented containers because before them we had this bunch of cisco's and mounts and primitives that we could combine to build like different sandboxes but docker really made this a commodity really likes kind of standardize it so it was immediately very easy for normal people to just work with these containers there's this little thing that you can run and move around it was a very big deal and it was such a big deal that everybody was using it everybody was calling that was a standard and with cloud foundry thought well everyone's using docker maybe we should so we did this little experiment we built a back end that we swapped for our like default back end that we'll be using docker this experiment didn't quite work because reasons like for example docker was a very big monolithic project that day and we only needed a little container runtime which garen was at that time it was not really practical to run all of docker which was coming with the UX which we didn't need in the platform and it was very opinionated we'd have to be fighting with it all the time so this plan was dropped on the floor basically and then luckily like a few years later the people behind containers and docker coro s they came together and started coming up with real open standards around containers and so the oci was born and the oci the open container initiative this is a set of standards for example the oci runtime spec is like a standard describing how you run containers and the oci image spec is focusing on layered file systems like the docker images as we all know and there was this cool little thing called run c and this was the first implementation of the oci runtime spec and this thing was nothing more than docker's core engine extracted into a small binary that was not opinionated it was highly configurable it was very lightweight and it was actually released under an open foundation and this was exactly what we needed so that's why we immediately started building our next back end for the garen api this marked the beginning of the so-called year of glue for the team this was a year where we spent like thinking about all those cool standards as we're coming along and how we can possibly bring them to the platform so the results were that we built the next back end the garen run c which obviously wraps around run c and uses run c to run the containers it's needed to say that we were able to delete a lot of in-house code so we were now owning a lot less code and better community code and we also did another project called Groot FS and this was a replacement for our image manager the one that was preparing the root fs's so Groot FS replaced the old one which was called which was called the garden shed and to say the least we didn't like this project very much so we really wanted to kill it so yeah we were able to delete a lot of code and at this point you're probably asking yourselves like well what is this garen project doing like it's basically steadily deleting parts of itself so what's the future where we're going what what are the garen teams goals what is garen for the short answer to this question is that the garden is for garen's main goal is to bring container technology to the to the cloud foundry platform and do so securely and to expand a little bit on that we have like basically we have three goals first we need to be the glue that glues together cloud foundry to containerization technology we are exposing all data platform needs and hiding all the complexity because container take is complex we should be delivering secure defaults because in the multi-tent world that we live in this is really important we need all the security there is and we don't want to leave it to the user like this is a cloud platform the user shouldn't care so we basically turn all the knobs that we possibly could and another important goal of the team is to help the platform leverage and like make max use out of the container take because it's subtracted from it we're hiding the complexity and we don't want to be hiding it too well and this container take is still being developed it's a whole thing so if we spot something that can possibly be a good use for like features we should probably propagate that knowledge upwards in the stack and now tom is going to tell us more about what did we do what cool new things that we do so that we achieve those goals great so clicker sure I probably should have practiced using this before I started talking there we go so let's talk about glue um there's a few things we've been working on in in sort of the glue category and the first thing I want to talk about these things called garden peas before I explain what a garden pea is you have to really understand what a kubernetes pod is so I'm sure a lot of you here are familiar with what a kubernetes pod is let's just give ourselves a reminder they're a collection of containers that share some stuff between each other so for example they might share a network namespace so they can see each other on their own local network um so in summary like a kubernetes pod is like a cluster of container images that are shippable but they're not entirely isolated from each other uh you're making some security tradeoffs for for some like nice to haves um it turns out that cloud foundry had a use case for such a thing um here's a few of them um so you may have heard of envoy um envoy is a process that does some networking stuff there are there are plenty of talks here about envoy uh that I'm sure we've seen but essentially envoy uh a requirement of that is it it needs access to the network namespace that a container it happens to be using uh so envoy is just a process that runs sort of partially inside the garden container only sharing the network namespace uh there's another example I can give called a health check and this is kind of exactly what it says on the tin it's a process that checks the health of the other process and uh the requirement here with with uh something analogous to a kubernetes pod was that we didn't want this health check to eat into your applications memory limits your application might have a memory limit of say 60 meg and the health check might be written in go and consume six meg just for the runtime that seems unfair that you'd pay for that so health checks live outside of of the uh the memory limits of your application but you can still see some things about the application uh there's a few other examples like cfssh etc but we won't really go into those um so I want to explain like a lame joke about why we called this thing garden peas um so if you think about a kubernetes pod a pod is a collection of containers and in dockerworld a container is represented by this fun little whale that someone drew and now think about a garden what's a pod a collection of the right it's peas um so we're trying a thing here you might have heard of test driven development we're trying name driven development and it seems to be working out so far um so there are some differences between a kubernetes pod and a garden pea and that's that garden peas are not user serviceable we don't want people using a cloud foundry to have to really think too deeply about them really we want people to just push that code and get a bunch of cool features for for free so all that garden really is doing here with this garden peas thing is is gluing a cloud foundry experience into low-level implementation details of a concept called sidecar containers uh on the topic of of glue we've also been working on uh some some more self deletion uh so garden's historical decision to replace the hand rolled container runtime with run c it made a lot of engineers very happy and was widely regarded as a good move um it was so good in fact that we thought well let's do it again um so a lot of smart people that worked at docker yet again extracted more patterns out of docker and we ended up with this thing called run c and uh sorry with uh with a thing called container d and container d it turns out had a lot of overlap in what it was doing uh with what garden was doing these features we built around run c within garden um so we thought that's pretty cool um we should probably use that uh we might end up use like owning less code we might end up with more eyes on the code that we did use it's an open source project um and really it gives us a chance to sort of give back to the community if we adopt this thing and and start using more of these standards um so that's that's been going pretty well um we've had a flavor of garden running in production um a large cloud boundary production for a couple of months now and it's actually been surprisingly stable relatively bug-free um it has exposed a few issues with garden and a few issues with container d itself and this is really given as a chance to contribute back to the community more we've we've in the past couple of years we've made efforts to contribute back to run c to fix things like getting it to run rootlessly that kind of thing um but until quite recently we never really had a dedicated effort to give back to communities for products where we use like container d in run c so in the past couple of months we've actually had a pair dedicated to just working on open source technology that we happen to use improving it fixing bugs adding features uh and it's it's been a really cool experience um next let's let's talk about secure defaults uh gilgi kind of briefly mentioned this earlier um so we use this thing called run c and run c uh lets you configure a container in such a way that you can add additional layers of security to your container there are things like username space is app armor set comp etc but by default uh run c won't necessarily turn many of these things on for you and uh garden deployments in cloud boundary we we want to be as paranoid as possible you want to be as secure as possible and then not using those features should be a conscious decision rather than the other way around um so so by default garden actually looks at this this this run c configuration it just it turns on every single security feature we feasibly can turn on um but there is there's a problem with that um and we we've kind of secured the container with this big heavy padlock but the the thing around that container the gate has got some pretty big gaps in it right we could quite easily just climb through that hole in that fence there and get inside the container and the the analogy i'm trying to draw here is that the garden server is still running as a root user um which which seems dangerous um and it turns out that you do need to be root to spin up containers in some way but you don't necessarily have to be root forever so we've been doing some work on getting the garden server running rootlessly and what that means is doing a bunch of rootful setup early in garden's life cycle and then quickly dropping to a non-root user um i won't dig too much into the details of that because there was another talk given yesterday um by another garden team member or two of them claudia bere spread and ed king um if you haven't already watched their video on youtube it's it's super interesting it's about garden's journey to run the server rootlessly um let's talk about cool container tech we've been working on um so there's this thing called uh oci build packs that we've been working on let let's step back from oci build packs for a second and talk about what happens today when you cf push something garden will will will be asked by diego to spin up a container and what it's going to do is going to it's going to orchestrate with gruta fs to create the file system for your container and it's going to do that by laying down this root file system and then it's going to take the the app bits for the thing that you pushed like it might contain your python code and and the python runtime and uh that data is going to be streamed into the container and then it's going to be untarred and then it's going layered on top of the root file system and that excuse me that really sucks um it sucks for a few reasons um untarring something is quite cpu intensive uh downloading something is quite slow and it really doesn't cache all that well the way that we represented on the disc excuse me that was very loud um and uh so we wanted to address this thing and if you if you look at the diagram that i drew here and forget the container bit around it that looks awfully familiar that looks a lot like uh a docker image uh a layered file system that a docker image might give you and so we thought why don't we take some ideas from the way that docker images are constructed and try to apply them to cloud foundry and uh we've sort of like dipped our toe in the water and and tried to treat the app bits more like an oci uh image compatible layer and uh we have a deployment of uh of cloud foundry with this mode enabled and we've actually seen uh a 33 percent performance increase on cf scale uh by enabling this so it it's pretty good there are future plans to to sort of like fully turn our images into oci compliant images um another thing that's happened sort of i want to say it almost as a side effect but we had this in our mind when we were spinning out this garden api that georgia mentioned earlier is that because we've detached the garden runtime run c um from the api that's used to invoke commands to run c um we kind of got windows support by doing that uh it turns out if you take this run c thing and unplug it and then plug in wincy uh or wink or wince that's pronounced several different ways i don't know which one's correct which is a windows implementation of uh the run c um container runtime it just works garden just works on windows out the box by plugging that other thing instead um so next georgia is going to talk about what's what's exciting what's upcoming uh in garden all right so what's next um first we spent a lot of time recently thinking about providing better ways of cpu sharing by providing better cpu metrics and this is to suggest that we don't think that the current cpu metrics that we're meeting are very good uh this is true and i'm going to try and explain why this is so uh so cpu sharing is no piece of cake right well maybe it is in a way if you think from the arse perspective the amount of cpu that your amp gets for a given moment in time is exactly this it's a piece of the whole cpu cake on the cell uh so we might we might play with an example so if i push so if you push today an app to to cloud found which is say 64 megabytes big 64 megabytes of memory uh suppose what happens if it lands on an empty or an idle cell where there are no other tenants uh how much cpu is this application going to be able to get well uh it's going to basically be able to eat up the whole cake because there's nothing there to prevent that and that's fine and when you list your apps like cpu usage then you're you're going to see a report of like 100% cpu provided that your app for example does an infinite loop or mines bitcoins or whatever so you're going to get 100% of cpu usage and this is fine there's nobody else there to use up this cpu but then tomorrow if uh if i push another app of the same size then it will be fair to like split the cake into two like so that you get 50% i get 50% and this is exactly what is going to happen uh but if you again list uh your api matrix today you're going to see 50% of cpu usage and this sucks right because this is not a really a metric like you need metrics as developers so that we can take decisions based on those metrics and this metric just dropped by half without me doing anything so it's not a good metric uh and like in order to make sense of this metric i need to understand that i'm running in a multi-tenant and that there are other people how big are their apps how big is the cell like how big is the whole cake how and stuff like that that these are this is no business like of the app developer as app developers uh you shouldn't care about this by definition so how do we plan to address this well instead of today's metric which is more or less uh what the machine reports a cpu usage like not a containerized one we plan on emitting two new metrics which will be absolute cpu usage that is the cpu time as reported by the kernel from the moment where the container was created until the present moment and an entitlement uh and the entitlement is an interesting one this has the semantics of what you paid for so this is going to be calculated by the system because the system knows all these details that you shouldn't care about like it knows what cell you landed on so it knows how much memory there is how much cpu so it can basically divide all the cpu to proportional entitlements and then when you get back those two metrics so the entitlement will be again cpu usage in terms of cpu time from container creation up to the present moment like what we paid for and when you get these two metrics it will be trivial to calculate a more stable percentage which will have the semantics of how much am i using from what i paid for which makes a lot more sense and again if you land on an empty cell you're going to see like values larger than a hundred percent but that's fine then you know like cool i'm getting cpu for free i didn't pay for this it's fine but then you can't count on this because tomorrow you might land on a busy cell and then you won't have the cpu so this is this is like we feel a much better way of committing cpu metrics and this is just the beginning uh this is not going to solve the problem this is just going to like expose metrics that describe the problem more or less uh what would be the next steps well after having these metrics we will provide some operator tooling so that the operator will be able to list all the apps that are consistently using more that they were paying for because it's important like we should consider limiting those apps enforcing the entitlement so that other people won't have like pushes that fell for example so that other people will be able to spike their cpus when they need to so we're going to collect feedback from those operators well we gave you this list do you think this is a correct classification do you think it will be good to enforce the entitlement on these apps and if the answer is yes we're going to automate all of that and which means that uh if you consistently use more than your entitlement you're going to be uh throttled the entitlement is going to be enforced so that other people can get a chance uh to have cpu spikes uh and that's how we achieve a better cpu sharing scheme we believe so in terms of future plans rootless container d although if i if i'm true to teams conventions i should be calling this rootless containerd you know so what is what is this all about well given that we're bringing this container thing to the platform we should make sure that it can run uh and create containers as a non-root user uh because we need all the security and speaking of containerd there's this thing called snapshots and this is containerd's model of dealing with layered file system so think docker images and this is pretty cool now it's one level higher than docker images it's not bound to any like shell algorithms or uh formats like tire etc it's pretty cool and given that root fs uh our root fs component is dealing with exactly the same thing uh we see even more overlap here so we should probably take this thing and like replace root with it and i guess this is more or less it so just a short recap what is garen for garen is glue it's security faults and leveraging container tech for the platform uh what did we do uh we gave you a piece like kind of bots in the cloud foundry world we are bringing containerd to the platform we are progressing to now a rootless rack of work i know we've been saying this for ages but we really are getting closer and we are converting buildbacks to docker images and we hope to come up with a better like a more fair cpu sharing scheme with that said we thank you and we welcome your questions any questions uh what is the performance win uh if we enable like the question was what is the performance gain if we enable the oci mode well uh we are noticing i think tom mentioned like about 30 percent of performance win on cf scale i think pushes are roughly the same but scales seem to to benefit the most for some exact numbers on our testing environment where we had this mode enabled it takes um six seconds to perform a cf scale um going from one instance to 10 instances and with oci mode enabled it takes four seconds yeah uh so the question basically the suggestion was that we kind of provide burst capacity for cf pushes so if we don't immediately limit uh we know about this this is on our radar uh we think that these two metrics might solve that because we don't intend to like immediately uh enforce this thing so you'll be able to burst but not consistently like not for a long time we also spoke about maybe reserving a portion of the cpu that isn't allocated to containers entitlement which would be a portion that other containers can spike into when they when they need when they need to with time we're over good any more questions if not we thank you for coming and thank you