The answer is yes. And the question, does the cold influenced affect the infrastructure in Canada? The answer is yes. Here on view from the north with retired businessman Ken Rogers in Kelowna, British Columbia. Welcome to the show, Ken. Hello, Jay. I think that whether cold weather affects infrastructure or not, the best example in the world today is Ukraine. Yes, I totally agree. You know, we in Hawaii, we don't have a sense of exactly what cold means. And when they say, gee, without, without energy, you know, oil or gas or what have you, without that, that zephyrit, zephyritia power plant, people are going to get really cold. And we don't, we don't really understand that. But you do, because you're Canadian and it gets really cold in Canada. So what is, what is cold in, you know, to you, what is cold in Ukraine mean? Well, Ukraine, geographically, you know, the southern parts of Ukraine, like along the Black Sea are about the same temperature as, oh, let's say, Iowa, or, you know, Oregon, depending on, you know, the weather formation at the time. But the important item is when it gets cold, it can get really cold. Now, lots of Americans would think of Minnesota or North Dakota as, you know, what might be cold? Well, parts of Ukraine are further north and inland from that. And, and so you get, you know, 30, 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. You know, when you walk on the snow, it squeaks.  Otherwise, the pipe will freeze. You know, you get lots of pipe freezing. You know, if you are not careful and you leave a window open, the pipe might freeze in your house. If these buildings didn't have heat, you know, what would happen? Could you work in a building without heat? Can the Ukrainians live in a building without heat? No. It's just point blank, no, you can't.  The candles would keep the room warm. Wow. You know, you don't need much. It's a matter of can it, can the heat escape out of the room? You know, like window insulation has to be better and, and, you know, you're. So I want to go from that to the question of infrastructure in a place that does get cold and it will be cold in Canada, at least your part of Canada within a week or two. So, you know, what happens to the roads? What happens to the sidewalks? What happens to the electric poles, telephone poles? You know, what happens to the telecommunications in general? What happens when it gets really cold? Well, most of the infrastructure works exactly the same way. You know, if you start off with electricity, you know, the, when you hang the, the wires between two telephone poles, when it's going to be cold at some time of the year, you make sure that you have a little more sag in the wire between the two poles because as it gets cold, it shrinks and, and the wire would get tighter.  Well, if it gets cold, the wire will snap. Similarly, you've got with your bringing drinking water, you know, your water has your municipality needs a way to make sure they've got the water that can be stored in a place that will not freeze in depth. So you couldn't have a, you know, you know, a very large pond that's only a couple of feet deep that might freeze for the whole depth and you'd not have your water. Well, it's very rare that something would not be deep enough that that there would be the water underneath the ice to draw upon, but your, your pipes to deliver the water to all households has to be deep enough underground.  The floor is at least five feet below the surface. What about roads, roads, little roads and big roads and turnpikes and freeways? You know, I mean, in my childhood in New York, they would put salt on the roads and the salt would melt the snow and that was good. But then the salt would eat the pavement. And at the end of the cold season, the pavement needed to be repaired or replaced. What do you do customarily in Canada about that? Well, in New York, you don't need to salt very often. If you're in, if you're in, you know, most Canadian cities, you know, the first thing you have is major snow removal. You know, and you have that in, in lots of the larger American cities. So, you know, whether it's Chicago or Buffalo or Minneapolis, you know, there's major snow removal first, but you also do the salting. And you then have extreme difficulty with things like mountain passes. For example, just inland from Seattle are a couple of very Canadian type mountain passes called, you know, snow qualmy pass, a wonderful, wonderful ski area. But in the wintertime, you know, they have, you know, snow removal going, you know, 24 hours a day if it's needed. And you've got to dry very cautiously going over the top and, and they do salt as well. You know, but snow removal is the main factor, you know, and in places like Vancouver, where it's very, very rare that it, that it's cold.  Like you have what are called snow tires. And, you know, if you're going on any mountain pass in Canada, it's legally required. You can't go in the road unless you have snow tires.  What about chains? Chains are one step further than snow tires, yeah? Yes, but most people are unable to put chains on their car. I mean, chains work for large trucks. The truckers are good at putting the chains on, you know, the wheel wells are more accessible than on a car. You know, the car is lowered the ground. And where I want to go with this is my, my, my guess would be that when you have cold weather, if you have to spend more money designing, building, maintaining, repairing infrastructure, like roads, like power, power, you know, power lines, like telecommunication lines, like airports, like, you know, infrastructure in general for every city water, because, because the cold has an effect and the change in temperature has an effect. This may not always be the case. One day, maybe soon, we'll have everything really warm with climate change. But for now, it still gets cold. And I guess my question to you is, is, is, am I right to assume that Canada in general spends more money on designing, maintaining, repairing infrastructure all kinds against the change in weather in the winter? Yes.  But more than that, I think of infrastructure is really what it, it's not just an economic issue. It's, it's how does it affect a way of life? You know, if you simply start with Hawaii and you say, walk out on to any street in Hawaii and, and it's uplifting, you know, you, you have a view of the ocean, you have the wonderful vegetation.  So, so you have, you know, the, the environment you start with is there. Well, and if you're going to put in, you start doing some infrastructure, you know, such as, you know, you build a freeway. Well, right away, you've spoiled other things. You know, anybody that lives near that freeway, especially a little uphill from it, has, has horrific noise damage. You know, you get cities like Calgary and, in Alberta in Canada, back when I was young and a senior planner for the city, we built some sound attenuation barriers whenever we were widening any of the freeways and, and those barriers enabled, you know, the ability to build a, you know, million dollar single family home on the other side of the barrier, but really within a few feet of the, of the freeway, which you can't do in other places. Well, I'm, I'm wondering also whether the Canadian model, both at the, at the provincial level and the federal level, attends to infrastructure. Whether you can say that, you know, they're out there working, they're out there improving it. You have a reasonable level of confidence that it won't be falling apart. You know, in Hawaii, you may be uplifting, but the roads are falling apart. We've had a war against bottles going on for a long time. And some people say that's because we don't put enough macadam down when we're, we're fixing the roads. I remember a trip my wife and I took to Italy not too many years ago, where every Italian highway, there were guys working, fixing. And I said, what is, what is all this? Why are they working and fixing on the roads? Well, because that's what they do. They insist on having good roads. So they work on the roads all the time. We don't do that. I don't know if that's happening in Canada. And I kind of doubt that it's happening in, in the mainland US, simply because when Joe Biden, you know, looked at the question of infrastructure, he found that it was not being maintained all over the country. And of course, the best way is the Italian way to just keep on working on it, not just letting it and abandoning it for decades at a time. What happens in Canada? Well, the story is different. And much like the US, a lot of the problems with infrastructure is which level of government is responsible for what? You know, you have the three levels of government, the municipal, provincial, or state government in the US. And then the federal, well, in Canada, the federal government has all the taxing power. The municipality has the majority, the responsibility for infrastructure. You know, so depending on the province, you have a very, very different situation in Canada. You know, Alberta as a province has the highest GDP per capita in Canada, much like Massachusetts has in the US, but for different reasons. But in Alberta, you've got a gorgeous highway running from some town that's nowhere to somewhere of lesser importance. You know, it's, and they're really well maintained.  And they take the risk whether the weather's better or worse. You've got in the mountain passes, you always have, you know, it's a government funded snow removal situation where in the US an awful lot of the infrastructure problems are relate to the obsession by some American governments, especially state governments that everything and anything should be private enterprise where, where really that doesn't work to your best benefit most of the time. You know, the simplest infrastructure example is, is healthcare compare Cuba with the US, you know, in the US, the, because of the idea that private industry should do absolutely everything, you know, the government can't do it as efficiently or whatever. Well, really, in, in the United States, the wealthy person has the best healthcare in the world. The poorest 25% have worse healthcare than Cuba than the poorest 25% in Cuba. And Cuba is one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere. Well, I'm just an interesting question because the more you look, including in Hawaii, the more you find that governments are delegating infrastructure maintenance, well, every aspect of infrastructure to contractors under contracts. And, you know, man, for example, I was on the neighborhood board here in my neighborhood. And every time the city showed up to report on what was going on, I said, do you have a list of the roads that you're supposed to be fixing? And the priorities. And every time I asked that question, they had to go somewhere. They never answered the question. And I don't think there was a list anywhere. So I mean, the idea is that there was nobody out there working directly for the municipality responsible to identify the roads that needed fixing and to fix them. And so you sort of wait until the public gets really irritated. And then you have a big contract to fix a lot of infrastructure too late at the same time.  But, you know, back in the 90s, the secretary of energy, Phil named Spencer Abram. And one day the Northeast grid went out. I don't know a whole combination of reasons, but the Northeast grid failed. And it failed for a lot of people, for millions of people. And they came to Spencer Abram and they said, what happened to you?  And his response sticks in my mind even till today after all these years. He said, what are you talking about? The grid was built like in the 50s. No municipality, no state, no federal government, you know, maintained it or repaired it in the way it should have been repaired and maintained. What do you expect? If you don't repair infrastructure, it fails, buddy. Don't look at me. And he was right.  Does that happen in Canada? Yes. And you get the same situation as in the US. For example, if you have hired a major road contractor to look after a section of freeway, you know, and they're contracted to do the maintenance over a period of years. Well, what tends to be the normal case in the United States especially, and it's hit and miss in Canada, is that in America, there's just kind of blindly the politicians assume that the contractor will do a wonderful job. You know, in Canada, we at least start with the idea that they may only be as honest as they have to be. Therefore, if we don't inspect or check up on it, you know, then, you know, we may get cheated. You know, and so, you know, the hit and miss is in some places and for some situations, the Canadian, when a private industry is looking after something like a nursing home or a senior citizen's home, then there isn't a government inspection checking it out. You know, but in some provinces, the same has happened in the US when COVID-19 shows up.  Nobody fixed the road or fixed the healthcare and it's not much better when you reverse it. You know, if the government's supposed to be doing something, you know, there's nobody checking that they're doing a good job. Well, suppose I gave you another world, a world where the government had to guy with the shovel. He was a government employee, okay, and the government had engineers that organized all this and used the technology to determine the useful life of these infrastructure elements and actually went out there at the end of the theoretical useful life and fixed it, maintained it. And they were ready at a moment's notice to go and fix that road or fix that wire or fix that facility, whatever it was. Government facility done by government, agencies, government management, government employees, would that be better? Do we know enough to answer that question generally? Or does that also depend on, you know, the government in question, the province or the state in question? As a general rule, would it be better if government did it itself? Well, two examples I know of, you know, both in Alberta, Calgary and Edmonton, they municipalities have a large engineering department, they employ people, they look after all that infrastructure, and they do a crackerjack job. There is not, you know, there's simply, you know, if the public doesn't like a road and they complain, you know, it does move through the system and get some attention. Now, I'm not that familiar with which level of government's responsible in other places, but certainly, you know, in the central Okanagan area of British Columbia, you know, it is not nearly as good as it is in those areas in Alberta. So that, I would guess it's hit and miss with government, really, you know, my underlying philosophy, kind of to repeat a point, is if government's responsible to do something, you need a mechanism by which the quality of job that they're doing is audited by somebody, you know, and similarly, if private industry is doing it, you better have some government agency auditing that they are doing it properly. Otherwise, I don't think you can be assured that infrastructure is as good as it should be. Well, you know, I was struck with, you know, the idea, and Trump was promising he would spend money on infrastructure, never did, and then when Joe Biden got in office, he was able to get some kind of bipartisan bill through laying, you know, hundreds of billions on infrastructure all of a sudden. And I said to myself, well, you know, what this means to me is not so much that he's organizing the repair and maintenance of infrastructure. And that's, you know, that's a good thing by itself. But he's really saying that we are behind. We are behind by hundreds of billions of dollars. And we were not paying attention. And when this money that he got Congress to appropriate for infrastructure, when this money is spent, what then? How long do we have to wait for this to happen again? The scenario repeats itself, like a news cycle. You wait until everything collapses and crumbles. You wait till the bridge falls in the river and oh, yeah, well, now we have to spend some money on infrastructure. You know, I find this completely inadequate as a long term solution. And I'm hoping that because of the cold, because Canada is Canada, that you don't have the problem that we have.  I'm not sure that I would agree with that fully. I think my experience, you know, traveling extensively in both countries, you know, that Canada generally is better with its infrastructure than the US. But we also have some blatant disgraces. You know, we have these native communities scattered all over the place in Canada, like Canada has about 6% of its population is is native. And a good percentage of them live on in native reservations, let's call them, and and they're in remote locations. And the federal government has been responsible for their infrastructure forever and ever. And it is absolutely disgraceful. We probably have, you know, half the native communities in Canada don't have clean drinking water. And we got 20% of the world's fresh water. Hard to understand. But let me know it reminds me, if you will, of some shows we've had with, you know, with lawyers, and I guess we call it those who seek equity justice in Bogota, Colombia. I know you spent time down there, that area and what when I was struck with was one lawyer who was responsible in his firm for raising capital and building infrastructure into the hinterland of Colombia. And PS, you know, Colombia, like many South American Latin American countries has these cities of gleaming steel and glass. But then, you know, 10 miles outside the city, you have jungle, and you have these these these towns and villages in the hinterland that are completely undeveloped. And his this mission in life, and his vision for his own, for his own, you know, way of helping, was to build infrastructure to these towns and villages. Why? Because if you build infrastructure, then you get knowledge, you get the internet, you get the ability of government emissaries to do their jobs in these places. You reduce the operations of the the FARC, you know, the guerrillas out there in the hinterland, and you essentially bring the country together and avoid the fragmentation and violence that you might otherwise have if you could not reach these these these rural areas. And he felt that that was a way to, you know, make a better life for everyone, if you could connect the country. But connecting the country was a matter of infrastructure. Now, it's not exactly the same in the US, because there's not too many places like that. But there are some, there are some rural areas that are not being reached, whether it be the digital divide, whether it be, you know, any number of economic things, governmental things that are not reaching these areas and and they are are they're suffering, whether they realize it or not, they're disconnected. Infrastructure connects. What are your thoughts about that, Ken? Well, just when you mentioned internet, you know, as I understand, there's between 5 and 10% of American citizens live in locations that they don't have broadband.  The but the idea to me of infrastructure is is that it is something that is designed, it's a an asset that increases the standard of living of the people where that infrastructure involved. Now, whether you call it well being or standard of living, I don't make a great distinction. It's not solely an economic thing. You know, if you're if you're going to have an airport and you've got lots more planes, you know, the good news is your your airport does certain things, but somebody lives in the flight path, you know, and so their well being or standard of living is reduced because they've got to deal with the noise. Similarly, you put in a, you know, in Los Angeles, you know, you've got freeways that make it so you can certainly get around easily. But on the other hand, most of the street freeways are on concrete stilts. And they're, you know, there's housing and other people living beneath the freeways, you know, and and they're really unsightly. They're not they're not that noisy because the sound goes up and, you know, the people are living below, but certainly compared to walking down Kalakaua Avenue in Hawaii, you know, it's a really ugly scene. You know, there's it spoils the the standard of living or the well being of the people and destroys the neighborhoods below and around. Yes.   Well, how do you create a subway after you've already got, you know, a pretty big city sitting above ground? You know, if you're going to close down a street, it's going to cost you billions of dollars for just a few miles of subway. So that, you know, there's not an easy solution all the way around. It's simply to recognize that infrastructure is important economically. If you use a simple example, one of the, you know, best infrastructure things the world ever saw was when Eisenhower created all the U.S. interstate highway system, where those freeways go through every city so that, you know, if you're going, you know, down the West Coast and you're going to go through Seattle, you can go through the whole city on a freeway.  And if you're going a lot of miles, some of which is in the country as opposed to only in the city, you'd be lucky to do 50 miles an hour average if you didn't have that freeway. Well, that's one and a half times as fast so that the driver, you know, if he gets paid for delivering the goods from point A to point B, you know, if he has to go on a back road instead of a freeway, he should only get two thirds as much money. You know, like nice, trying to give it the equation of how does it affect economics? You know, it's pretty blatantly obvious. Yeah. But you can actually make a, you can make a model, you can make a chart. There are lots of those models out there, you know, like the U.S. or the American Society of Civil Engineers does a report every year on the U.S. infrastructure.  And so, they have all kinds of models for rating different infrastructure.  So, they get a fairly good grade for delivering freight, you know, but the passenger traffic gets sort of a D minus, you know, and I could agree with that. I recently rode an Amtrak train from Newark Airport to Penn Station in downtown New York. Well, the train just shook back and forth sideways and it was the most ancient, you know, train coach that I've seen in many, many years. It reminded me of a trip I took across Canada on a train when I was 23 years old going from Montreal to the western Canada. And, you know, at least the train back in those days I thought was not too bad, but this Amtrak looked like the leftover coach from 50, 60 years ago.   I mean, you've got places like Japan with a gorgeous high-speed rail, you know, Taiwan has it, China has it. I mean, some really poor countries got way better, you know, passenger rail service than the U.S. Yeah, going back to the point of, you know, having government attend to this, having government structure itself, so that it pays attention. I think there's a natural inclination in this country and maybe to some degree in every democracy. If you put the infrastructure in there in the 50s, it must still be working. As long as it's not falling in the river, you don't have to do anything about it. This is a mistake. You have to pay attention to it all over the country. I'm thinking of Flint, Michigan and the water. Nobody paid attention. And now the population of Flint, you know, was pretty ticked off about the water. And this is, you know, exhibited in so many places in so many ways, not just, you know, the train into Manhattan. So I think we need to rethink infrastructure in this country. And maybe to a lesser degree, we need to rethink infrastructure in Canada and various other democracies. It's interesting too that the newer countries, the ones that built those high-speed rail facilities only, you know, 10 years ago, they're way better off than we are. Although I would say that those countries probably pay more attention to maintaining the high-speed rail than we spend maintaining the low-speed rail. In any event, infrastructure is a big category of things that includes so many things. The idea is it includes things that people expect the government to either do or manage. And I don't think we can be cavalier about it. Your final thoughts? Well, I think the U.S. Biden's infrastructure bill is really a wonderful step in the right direction. In studying the detail, I saw one piece that I thought was missing. You know, there's effort to deal with water infrastructure like the Flint, Michigan problem.  You know, as I think that, you know, the Central Valley in California is one of the major assets the United States has and something that, you know, Hawaiians would understand if you have to bring all your food in from somewhere else, you've got a major problem. You know, you need to be more self-sufficient on certain things and food is a major one of those. And to let the Central Valley die because of lack of water, which is really what's going to happen if there isn't infrastructure to get additional water there, you know, whether you're going to run a pipeline from the mouth of the Columbia River down to California or not. I think it's a lot better investment than fixing Fort Myers, Florida that's going to flood again. To say. So much more to discuss, Ken. We'll be back in two weeks, hence, and we'll make other comparisons and lessons between Canada and the U.S. I look forward to these conversations. I learned so much. Thank you so much, Dr. Ken Rogers. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.


Harjeet Singh from ActionAid, thank you so much for joining us, first off I just wanted to ask about your expectations of this conference. I think the interest has been growing, this is my third CBA conference, last year we focused on scaling up and we see so many people getting excited, the experiments that are going on in the field, they really want to see how those experiments can be scaled up. This time we are talking about communication I think which is to take the adaptation work to the next level and deepen it further. There are good developments happening outside in the external world on the policy part. So this platform has a lot to offer to those international structures and institutions that are coming up to make sure that the whole work is on the right track particularly at the policy level because now the national level policymakers, the international level policymakers are sitting together and trying to understand this adaptation science much more and to see how we are going to deal with the challenges that we are facing due to climate change. And do you think communication between the various stakeholders at the international and local level has been effective so far on this issue? The communication has increased a lot, we see that the negotiations that are happening at the UNFCCC level, you find a lot of local organizations participating and sharing their experiences. Platforms like these, what CBA offers is also a place where you find policymakers coming and multilateral institutions coming and you find NGOs who are working at the national and international level are coming, very, very local grassroots organizations also come and share their experiences. So I think it's very important to create such platforms and the work that's happening at the international level, they are also the policymakers are very receptive, they know that adaptation is a new science and they need to keep hearing about the experiments that are happening, nothing is cast in stone. So you have to be flexible, you have to be receptive and you have to hear more and more about the local challenges and the solutions and alternatives that communities are building. I think that's happening. I think the interaction among different stakeholders is increasing. You said in your talk this morning that sometimes stakeholders or NGOs forget that this is a conversation rather than just a simple communication issue. What did you mean by that? Communication still remains a big problem and climate change with a bit of technical things, it becomes even much more complex. And what we find right now is we are only looking at one way, I won't even call communication. We are either extracting information in terms of what's happening to the communities or we are just going and saying we will build your awareness, we know what you need and we will tell you what to do. I don't think it's going to work like that. In fact, for Action 8, even our normal development program, we don't work like that. We look at a tool which gets into more reflection action mode where communities actually analyze their own vulnerabilities, their own issues. So we only facilitate those processes and for climate it's going to be even more important. We're talking about an unpredictable world, things are going to be much more uncertain unless communities are empowered, unless you have a conversation with them. Yes, they know a lot about impacts than we do because they are facing it every day, they are living that life. But in terms of causes, because the causes go much beyond their geographical boundaries, so there we have to bring in that new information, the science and blend it with their own local and traditional knowledge. And that cannot happen unless you work in a more conversation mode and the dialogue has to happen in two ways and several ways, sideways. So that conversation is very important and that's why the reflection action methodology we think is going to work a lot because eventually communities need to be empowered to deal with those challenges. They can't be prescriptive. There's no one solution that's going to work. If you empower them, if you know how to analyze the problem, how to mobilize resources, how to implement it and then reflect on it and also feedback into the policy process. If that happens, I think our job is quite done. And why isn't this happening enough already? What are the barriers and challenges to doing this effectively? I think it's to do with the attitudes, I would say at all levels, right from policymakers to even community leaders to people like us from civil society organizations. We think that we have the solutions. We think we understand their issues much, much better. That's not the case. Communities are facing it every day. They know what they're going through. And they also have a lot of resources. They're not sitting idle, right? They are working on their own solutions. What they need is a bit more support and the new knowledge that's coming up, the new science, we need to bring that in. So we have to play more of a facilitative role and overcome our own perceptions and ideologies and go to the grassroots, sit with people and particularly women in other vulnerable sections and see what they're facing, what capacities do they already have and what they need from within the communities and from outside so that they are both in terms of program policy and financial resources so that they can develop their own solutions, their own alternatives. Can you just give a couple of examples to illustrate the kinds of solutions that are being come up with by communities? No, we are seeing communities, their livelihoods are getting impacted. You know, a shift from, you would say in Bangladesh, from chicken to ducks because ducks are much more resilient. You would find people who are working in handloom factories, their factories are getting, these are small units, let me not call that factories, small units which are getting impacted by the weather patterns, they are closed for a couple of months. We are working with them to make sure that these small units can run around the year and how it's going to deal with the new climate challenges and we have been able to resolve that and communities have actually come together and these are all vulnerable communities who are now looking at all dimensions, who are looking at business in a very kind of professional manner, you know, how their business is getting interrupted by these extreme weather events, what exactly they can do, how they can prevent flooding to happen, what kind of structural solutions they need to have, what kind of policy interventions are required, how they can sell their stuff, how they can stock it. So there are a number of things that they need to look into. In certain areas, a lot of areas, they have that expertise. In certain cases, you have to bring in new knowledge, so you have to sit together, you have to work hand in hand, you have to work with the community. If you go with the approach of working for the community, it's not going to work and solutions are there. You know, our people have come up with the sanitation solutions where you use very, very less water, we know that water is going to be scarce. So start looking at the challenges which communities are going to face, see what's going to work and then come up with solutions, bring scientific knowledge, build on the traditional knowledge and we can always come up with new solutions. Just finally, you said you've been to a number of these conferences now. In three or four conferences time, what do you expect to see? What's your vision for the future of community-based adaptation? You know, we still, the community-based adaptation debate is very much within civil society. Governments have picked up, but more as a jargon than as a perspective, than as an ideology. You know, when we talk about community-based adaptation or any kind of community-based work, for us it's an ideology, it's a basic principle, it's an approach, you know, how we make sure that whatever we do, and community-based adaptation doesn't mean that it's only working at the community level. It's about any policy intervention at international or national level, you know, how it is going to strengthen the community-based work. That's, because communities are the ones who are at the forefront of these climate impacts. They need to be much more, you know, empowered to deal with that. So when we say community-based, we need to see how much that, those processes are strengthening their institutions, you know, their knowledge systems. That needs to be understood. And governments are still using it as a terminology. Our vision is to see that governments really adopt this approach, make sure that they also change their mentality, their ideology, and then the policy mechanisms support that. Simple things like building capacity, encouraging leadership at the local level, strengthening the existing institutions, making sure that the resource is available much at the local level. Decentralized planning is going to be key. So there are a specific set of solutions if they really adopt. Communities will feel much more empowered to develop their own plans. So instead of making plans in the boardrooms, if plans emerge from the ground, that is going to be a real community-based work and that's what we want to see in the future. Haji, thank you so much for speaking to us. Thank you.


We've never had a more enjoyable NFL playoff in this country and we've never had more people watching the playoffs and yet it goes on amid the ongoing allegations against Dan Snyder or the Washington football team and, you know, the continuous concussion concerns and now the concerns about diversity and the allegations and the questions about competitive integrity even and who are we to criticize China's human rights records when we have ongoing attacks by the agents of the state against unarmed citizens and we've got assaults on the voting rights of our people of color in various states in this country. So I appreciate everything you just said there. Yes, he just compared China's genocide of a Muslim minority to drama in the NFL and voter ID laws that are widely popular. Stuff like this really leaves me wondering.  Second, has he been paid off by China? Does the CCP have something on him or on ESPN? Is an ESPN supposed to be a sports channel? Yet increasingly they look and sound like CCP propaganda.


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


The crime threats over the airport is very dynamic across many borders and involve criminal groups based in many countries These characters make the international cooperation Important to achieve a more effective passenger interception to identify all the involved in the crime and avoid that states expand the resource doing inspection procedures in passing that were expected before


With forward pay from Appalachian Wireless, you'll avoid contracts and credit checks while taking advantage of some awesome perks like unlimited talk, text, and three gigs of data for just $44.99, or with five gigs for a mere $59.99. Forward pay, that's today's Appalachian Wireless. A Virginia couple, 18-year-old Desiree Maggard and 19-year-old Donovan Mullins, both of wise, are facing felony theft and criminal mischief charges in relation to the alleged theft of a box trailer from the Burdine Church of God of Prophecy near Jenkins. Let your sheriff's deputy Alicia Congleton said after the trailer was stolen in late August. It was captured on surveillance video from Waylon's Body Shop near the church, being pulled by a white SUV. Congleton said after images of the vehicle pulling the trailer were broadcast on EKB News, a viewer spotted the vehicle in Norton, Virginia. From there, officers in Virginia quickly located the vehicle and eventually the trailer, which had been sold to a pawnshop in Coburn, Virginia. After the contact was made with these two subjects, it led them to Lonesome Pine Gunnham Pawn over there, where they located our trailer, the trailer that was stolen from the Church of God of Prophecy. Congleton said it was found that Maggard and Mullins may also be responsible for other trailer thefts in Virginia and also in Pike County, Kentucky. Mullins was already under indictment for one such theft in Dickinson County, Virginia. And although they did open an investigation, once they figured out, you know, that these people had sold the same pawnshop, approximately seven trailers, they knew that they had had something. Deputy Congleton said the public was a big factor in locating the trailer, which is now back in the position of the church. That's how we found them, is somebody was at Walmart and seen the vehicle and posted it on Facebook and that's, you know, like I said, without that, we wouldn't be here today. We obviously appreciate the person that shared the video or the picture on Facebook and just encourage people to do that in the future, you know, if you see something, say something. If convicted, Mullins and Maggard could face five years in jail for the theft. Reporting in Letcher County for EKB News, I'm Chris Anderson.


The Tennessee Titans are two and two, but last Sunday they fell to a winless New York Jets team in overtime. It has been a rough week to say the least. New York Jets, that's it. Trust that the man next to you is going to do his job. We all going to do our job. We going to ball up. That's it. Rose losing the football is the tight end. The Titans have picked it up with Byrd to the end zone. Give Henry left side hold. Titans on the ball. Gives Henry at right guard in trouble. Being chased, being the Titans come to North Florida and get it done.


We, this is Kai, Nikolai and me, and we're working for systems multimedia solutions in Dresden, Germany. And there we are part of an awesome cross-functional team of software developers and architects, consultants and project managers. And with all these different skill sets in one place, we're involved in a wide spectrum of topics in the area of work, for example change and adoption, conversational interfaces and of course enterprise video streaming. So and now as you know who we are I will send over to Kai who will tell you why you should forget YouTube and how we combine Drupal and our video streaming expertise. So yeah, hi. Yeah, let's start with the challenge with the idea of the project. So we had some request from the customer. There was of course like typical project, some requirements but not all. They just want to see how it's going to be, how it can look like. So that means we need to start fast. We want to make some progress and then we want to show all the results to the customer and develop a good platform that fits all the needs and see how it is working, maybe do another cycle of that. At least we need the goal was to develop an enterprise video on demand platform that is accessible from the internal network and the internet. So maybe this is a special need for this customer but it was prior to number one. Of course the platform must be a state of the art, so responses and all stuff like that. You all know that and lots of third party services must be connected and also our platform needs to be included into other platforms like e-learning systems. They want to use the videos in their e-learning systems and they have quite a lot of this. And yeah, at least user management should be included. So therefore we thought about what to use and we came to TruePile. Also because of these two guys there are TruePile developers and let's have a look to the high-level architecture. Yeah, that's just simple scheme to give you an high level view how the things are going and how we decided to manage these problems. You can see we have these two sites on the one hand the internet connection and the other side the internal network of the customer. Both are accessing our application through a load balancer within the open telecom cloud. That's the big part in the middle. Of course the application is TruePile application that is built on the base of Kubernetes with a DB connected database connected and TruePile acts as the yeah maybe let's say the management system for all the video files. Therefore we have just these external storage. This is mounted via LFS share. All content is saved on this storage for maybe two reasons. One is of course lots of files. Others is we need the whole Kubernetes cluster to have access on it. And the last one is that the streaming server that will have to stream all the video chunks to the users needs also at least reading access to the storage. One of the security services is on the right side on the left side from your point of view the encoding services. So we get the original video files from the users store them on our storage but also send them back to the encoding services for current implementation. This is the Azure media services and we will get the results back the encoded files and take them again in our network. Yeah let's have a look at the key features. I did a little screencast for you. So to show you some just some basic features. At least you have the view with some channels there you can divide the content. Each channel can have several videos and at least we have for the editors that are authenticated a list of videos that are already in the system and are created. As an example I will just create a video just add the title drop a video file over here upload it and select the language for that because our platform is multilingual and you can also store for each language several or other for every language single video. Yeah if you have saved this once then in the background the encoding process starts running and you can keep editing the video at some content at some categories and also at some chapters. Chapters are yeah interesting for most of our customers because they won't just point to one time slot at the video and don't want the users to watch a whole video of one hour if they have some important information just at the end. Already if the video is not really encoded yet you can still watch the preview. This is available right at the beginning. You can test if your chapters are working if everything is fine and also jump around within this time slot of video. If everything works as expected of course go on with the workflow edit the video and publish it for all your users and here you can also start embedding this video into other sites. As you can see the video is already queued for the encoding service so there's also the feedback for the editor something is happening in the background everything works as expected. So what's next here. Here you can see for example the embed code to include this video into learning management systems or other e-learning platforms or whatever you want and you will also get if the video is ready encoded some direct links to the manifests of the video. This was a special use case for our customer. Yeah now the first thumbnail is already generated so you can also choose between I guess the basic configuration is between 10 thumbnails. You will get the video in three different qualities if the encoding is ready and let's go to the next slide. Yes additional one thing we have some features that need write listing for our customer that means I talked about embedding to other platforms they just want their videos within their platform. They don't want the users to take the videos out and publish them in the whole internet so we need to implement write listing for referrals and also for internal IPs so that employees from the internal network do not need to authenticate. Okay so but what about the competitor's view. The question is why do we need to implement all these features these are only basic features from the beginning and here we have some of the reasons you just tell look what is possible there are lots of products on the market but nearly none of them is possible to serve videos to internal networks and to the internet. Either you choose one of both but never the you got never product which can do both of these. Also we need some really flexible flexibility of the API that means all of the content types within our platform must accessible via API. There must be the possibility to maintain all the content. Additionally we choose the Trooper solution because of the wide range of add-ons and the customer specific features not all of the features are completely clear at the beginning of the project and so we are flexible enough to add these add-ons later on and at least we're from Germany so security of the data is still one big point and our customer wants to have the access to the data they want don't want to have the data outside of his own cloud. This was the short introduction into features we can of course speak later on if you have interesting ideas or any additional questions and in July we'll go on with our vision. Yes with the last interesting part what is what is the feature of that that we built what is our vision where we should go from now on. We did an MVP with the most basic like we take a customer project and said okay we do an MVP we want to see if Trooper is the right way to go the right solution for this and we said yeah it is we saw that it is but we have a long way to go and the first thing we did we thought okay we used for the implementation we used one of the most flexible and powerful content management frameworks out there and open source and we say okay we love Trooper we love open source we want to give back something to the community and our vision is to do this as some other Trooper distributions are already doing it and our vision is to make divided functionality in two layers to have Trooper distribution at the basis where we provide the most important functionalities that we have here so this will be available in Trooper.org and we will have here the basic configuration of the things that we saw right now like content types, fields, like base team and things like this also the video content management, user management that we have from Trooper core of course and also the abilities to add subtitles to add chapters to the videos also to have the channel possibilities and some basic stats and then on top we will have more like a premium layer where you could buy some premium features like the thumbnail generation or maybe our Azure integration for adaptive bitrate encoding also password protect we have the ability for password protect several videos or token access to videos and on top of that we are planning to have support and hosting if you want to have some kind of premium I don't know like customer specific features to be implemented or yeah and but this is only the MVP that you have right now and have a long backup of ideas where we can go from now on and this is what it could look like we can see the our basic distribution is getting the larger and larger and here are some ideas that we have the one is for example transcoding services API currently we are using Azure but the idea or the perfect the perfect world will be to have some kind of a lovable API to have for example plugins for different transcoding services say okay I want Azure or I want moving or I want maybe also something local like this would be a big thing to do and we have some quick wins from Drupal from our beloved Drupal for example commenting on videos this is something like pretty straightforward to do and of course combined this with user profiles with user images like profile images also views of what I have uploaded all the things that we know also from YouTube also things like ratings and abuse reported they could be very easily implemented with the flag module and also personal playlist this is also a thing that we have on our agenda or what is our idea and also another thing that we're thinking about is subscriptions having subscriptions to subscribe either to channelists or to users so if some new video is coming to this channel I have subscribed I get notification or it's the outer is supporting a new video I have also getting I'm also getting a notification on this and another thing is of course sharing but not sharing in social media because we are a little bit in the more enterprise words in the company and so the idea would be here to share a video with other users on the platform and on the premium level we have some ideas of using machine learning they will be we will be using the Azure services to have for example face recognition so for example with the CEO is speaking something having a talk on this video we will do then a face recognition and then we can do a recommendation of or a list of other videos where the CEO is also having talks or something like this another thing is to generate automatically generate captions from the meat from the video so that the editor doesn't have to put to write them down by themselves and we can also then automatically translate those in different languages so yeah the idea for the editor will be only to upload the video and everything will be there automatically and magically and another thing also a little bit combined is the recommendation engine combined with machine learning but also to have something like yeah similar videos like this this is this is the idea we have to of course find the budget to do this and we go the way like finding customers and do yeah this is a tricky one this will be the perfect world to do it and we'll be very happy if we can do it like this but yeah let's see we hope that we can do it yeah so this is our vision and yeah we want now to thank thank you for your patience and for the attention and we are also open for your questions and I have to also show this one do you already have this does it have a name no we don't we don't have it this is the plan this is the vision right you have some modules already yes right now we are we have this stage where the whole product right now is not finished so we maybe need one or two more sprints then the base features are finished we can hand over to the customer and after that we start completing our vision and try to find ways and how to provide this distribution okay so you will publish some things on this would be a distribution actually right with configuration and some custom modules and how can we follow you what's the name of this it's not there right now are you guys looking for co-contribute this to this project when we are on the state we're definitely yeah we will glad to have people over this this is also the romantic thing of open-source right this is also when a customer pays for something that maybe they can also pay for some new features that we can implement and all the other customers and all the open-source community can also profit from this technical question about the streaming server and coding service that you use you design your solution to be compliant with any formula the thing behind is to be most comfortable to several devices so that means we are encoding the direction of video files to impact dash and M3U8 manifest and we're also including like the impact dash then the M3U8 and after that mp4 file to our players so that the mechanism behind can choose what browser are you using what device are you using and the user for 99% will get a good video and after that you can order the automatically chooses the quality basic is the bandwidth the users connected so we try to make it like the most comfortable way yeah he's in the explorer is working perfectly right now okay so thanks a lot