Welcome to our digital grid summer webinar series. In this first of our summer series, co-hosted by Epri and Stanford, we are going to be going through the lessons learned from the digital grid virtual workshop that we held two weeks ago. And my name is Omar Siddiqui, I'm a Senior Program Manager at Epri and I'm joined as my co-host by Liang Min, Managing Director of the Bits and Watts Initiative at Stanford University. It's our pleasure to host you and I know people are coming in as we are speaking so look forward to having you all participate and to learn and get some perspective from the really important event that we held two weeks ago. So let's just get right into it in respect to everyone's time. First of all, this is a recorded webcast. Right now we have everyone that's in an attendee on mute. That's just to keep the noise down and make sure that we keep things going as minimal disruption as possible. But this is interactive and we want your participation. I certainly recommend using the chat feature which you can see in the toolbar at the bottom. If you look there, it's a great way to select and type in your question. You can also select yourself as an attendee and raise your virtual hand to ask a question. But we will be monitoring the Q&A chat session as we go forward. And again, this is being recorded so your participation is your consent to being recorded. And all of the presentations, this presentation today as well as the recording, will be available and posted on both EPRI and Stanford websites and we'll provide some more information on that. So thank you for your understanding. We are really excited to be hosting this summer webinar series and the objective is just to make sure that we're all oriented.  And we heard a lot about that at our digital workshop event last week and we will be getting some better perspective onto here today. And over the course of this weekly summer webinar series, we are going to be focusing on identifying the critical gaps towards achieving this shared integrated grid vision. Principally, the enabling data platforms to make it happen, and you see in the graphic on the right, the different elements that a shared integrated digital grid entails. And one of the key underpinnings is enabling data platforms. So that's one of the issues that will be, thematically, that will be explored as well as understanding the utility industry requirements for having, you know, for what a this, what such a digital or data platform would entail and discussing the technology solutions to help bridge those gaps. Ultimately, we are looking for this activity to help inform ongoing activities around advancing research, culminating in a collaborative research initiative industry-wide that we are looking to launch to make sure that we accelerate the development of these enabling data platforms to enable the shared integrated grid vision. On our, the first of our meetings, two weeks ago at the digital workshop, my colleague, Vice President Mark McGranagher at EPRI, presented a vision of a shared integrated grid. And one of the things I would say to consider is the idea of, when we speak of an integrated grid, we are thinking not only in terms of electric infrastructure, but also the, you know, interconnection of an enabling telecommunications infrastructure, the enablement of customer-centric local energy networks. So when we think of an integrated grid, we are one of the key elements is the seamless integration of customer resources to help enable a more flexible, more resilient grid. And so that's the pulling together of both local energy optimization as well as global or macro energy optimization. So we see a proliferation, a growing adoption of distributed energy resources on the customer side of the meter, whether we speak of photovoltaics or electric vehicles, energy storage, other types of advanced controls, smart thermostats, and so forth. So the question becomes, how can these internet-connected devices, for the most part, be optimized such that they fulfill the functions for which the customer has them for, but can also be intelligently dispatched when needed to provide grid flexibility and other needs? We see, I think, most people here would recognize and acknowledge the potential for this, as for these customer resources to be a great grid asset, but how you make that happen is the key. So our theme is how we can get to that point to bridge the technological as well as other gaps to help achieve this shared integrated grid vision. As I said, we're building on, through this weekly webinar series, the success of our digital grid virtual workshop from June 9th through the 11th. And just as a recap, we had two great keynote addresses, actually a third by a data tenant house of VMware. My apologies for that, not being there on the screen. Panel sessions, a U.S. utility session, a European session, and a technology session. And speakers representing a diverse array of organizations from utilities in the United States to European entities and notable technology companies from around the world. The presentations and the recordings from those sessions are available at the links below, both on the EPRI site as well as on the energy.standford.edu website. So we encourage you, if you have not already, to go to those sites to view the presentations and the recordings. And this session as well will be similarly housed in those same repositories. Just speaking on behalf of our two host organizations, EPRI, we're an independent nonprofit research organization. Our focus is on R&D on all aspects of the electric utility industry for the benefit of the public. And our mission is really to advance safety, reliability, efficiency, affordability, and health and environment through our collaborative research. With regard to Stanford, you know, our bits and watts initiative, and Leanne can certainly speak on this, but it's a major Stanford initiative focused on digital innovations for the 21st century electric grid. And they advance a number of areas, including business innovation policies around customer control and end user technologies, and rethinking the relationship between consumers and the electric grid going forward. And our shared goal is, as I mentioned, to convene thought leaders. And we're really excited to have today and through the series planned really a great collection of speakers to advance ultimately the development of standardized data platforms to enable grid integration of customer resources. So with that, I just wanted to mention here again that we have, after this week, we have a weekly session. The next two we have confirmed, as you see there, an innovation panel next week, moderated by Steve Camillo, professor of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. And the following week, a university panel where we have two outstanding researchers, Amra Furie from Dartmouth and Ram Rajagopal from Stanford. So look for the reminders on that. And as we fill the agenda for the weeks forward, we will keep everyone informed. So reserve this space and time for this webinar series. Let me turn it over now to Leanne, and we can talk about our speakers for today. So Leanne, over to you. Thank you, Oma. So today we invite the three outstanding moderators who helped us two weeks ago, moderated the three sections, U.S. panel, U.S. utility panel, European utility panel, and the technology company panel.  And the more importantly is to add their perspective into this topic, because we all believe that to achieve the vision of integrated grid and also a standard platform to integrate customer DER, we need to do it in a collaborative and open way. And so you can see each of them has extensive knowledge and experience in both digital side and also energy or electrical grid side. And each of them, besides working on their own company, also offer a lot of help in a collaborative way in different transactions. So our first moderator who helped moderators the U.S. utility panel is Rich Gatica. And he is a senior program manager at Electrical Power Research Institute, APRIC. And he leads the information and communication technology for the integration research program at APRIC. And before APRIC, and Rich worked at GreenLots as the chief research officer and focusing on the EV integration and battery technology side. And before GreenLots, Rich worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and as a deputy leader for the grid integration research program and also is responsible for the chief architect for the international data standard for the demand response, which is OpenADR. Our second moderator who helped on the European panel discussion is Mark Shebo. And Mark is the chair and co-chair for the ETIP, which is the European Technology Innovation Platform, SNET, Smart Network for Energy Transition. The group, one of the group is called the Digital Energy Group.  And he is also the chair for the ETIP Battery European Group, which is focusing on the battery digitalization and energy digitalization task force. And he is a senior VP and senior executive digital officer for GE Digital. And also he is involved on the business side. He is the chair for the Gavidin Board for the RIP, stands for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency, which is an investment venture capital firm. Our third moderator is responsible for the IT sector, the technology panel on Thursday as Nikola Pilmode. And Nikola is the director for sustainability innovation at VMware. And he collaborated with VMware, different business units in the team to improve VMware's product and also the operational efficiency for their customer and also for the company. And before VMware, Nikola worked at Akma Technology and responsible for the renewable procurement for the Akma company and to ensure the environmental sustainability for the company. And she is also the board of directors for the renewable energy buyer alliance, which a lot of IT companies, energy companies are part of this alliance and work together to figure out the strategy that how the company can go toward zero emission. So without further ado, I'd like to hand this to our first speaker and also the moderator for the US Utility Panel, Rich. Thank you, Leanne. I really appreciate that. I guess I can advance the slides now. So, Arli, are you going to be loading my slides? Your slides are loaded. Just click on the down arrow. Down arrow, okay. Wonderful. I hope everybody can see that. So the panelists who represented the US Utilities, I'll quickly go over the US Utilities who participated in the first panel, focused mostly on four key areas. One is what are the experiences with respect to this particular area of shared integrated grid, the digital platform description that Omar just gave a little while ago. Some of the challenges they're facing, where are the opportunities and some of the data requirements because we are emphasizing the data requirements from this project's perspective or this area perspective. And all of those looking from the perspective of customer side resources and specifically understanding and improving grid flexibility and reliability and also enhancing the customer experience. So the panelists who participated in this were three utilities that span from all the way from the east coast to the west coast. John Hughes represented Emmerin. He's the director of IT and Network Engineering Operations at Emmerin. You know, John brings in an amazing amount of experience in terms of information technology over 33 years while he's been working with Emmerin. He also sits on the board or rather sits still on the advisory board of the ICT program as well. You know, Lara Fairpoint is an amazing, very dynamic person that has immense knowledge in terms of focusing on the technology innovation activities for energy with an excellent. She also leads the corporate strategy team to really advance the futuristic energy technology trends. So Lara brought an amazing amount of knowledge and contributions in terms of what actually a salon is doing in the space. And finally, from the west side, Larry Beckerdahl, who is the VP for Grid Architecture at Portland General Electric, you know, showed us a glimpse of what PG&E is doing. Portland General Electric is doing to build a grid of the future, specifically focusing on things that are resilient, smart and also clean energy future, a lot of renewables in the grid. You know, similar to John, Larry is also the advisory committee for every and also the Stanford University bits and watts program, which is, you know, co-hosting this particular, you know, series of workshops. So just to summarize, you know, everybody presented almost for 40, 45 minutes. I'm trying to summarize everything in a few slides. To be a couple of slides to be precise, but also go over quickly some of the slides, some of the key highlights that each of the presenters presented to summarize them. One of the, you know, areas that we focus a lot is on engaging the customer resources, because that's what we want to emphasize, that's what we want to prioritize. You know, if I had to pick four key common challenges, all the utilities described in the presentation, these are the four ones that we see here. We all understand, you know, grid is a very complex system. It's in fact the systems of systems, you know, as we go all the way from generation down to the customers who consume the electricity from electricity that's generated, you know, a lot of information and interactions and, you know, actors have to play a very critical role in delivering that electron down to your home. What's one of the major challenges these are facing is their intent to lower the greenhouse gas emission and show environmental stewardship. We have seen in the past that, you know, the generation and, you know, transportation sectors have been very big contributors of greenhouse gas emissions along with the induced sectors. One of the areas that the utilities have, you know, taken a big leadership and I'm trying to figure out how they can get to that, you know, meet that leadership is in the transportation sector. The electrification of transportation is playing a very critical role in some of the challenges it will be facing. The second one was in the smart technologies.  That is a very critical thought. The third one is on the communications network. You know, you cannot make the grid smart without having communications in the grid, right? So communications, but not just communications, but reliable communications. How can you rely on this communication system so that when you can communicate with the customer resources or even the customers themselves, you can rely on that. And finally, you know, the new business models or services or market-based approaches play a very critical role. You can have a smart technology, a willing customer, a willing utility, but all of those may not happen unless you create a market around it, which is where the real-time pricing, dynamic pricing, TOU tariffs play a very critical role in enabling such a customer engagement. And these are how do you enable them or some of the challenges. So to look at what Emeryn, and this is a slide I picked up as a summary slide from Emeryn, you know, they have a very good view of the future, what they want to achieve. You know, one thing is for sure, you know, whether we have seen that with the global changes in the renewable, you know, adoption, renewable energy generation adoption, environmental changes facing globally, the United States is not any different. You know, the bi-directional energy and microgrids are becoming increasingly important. In fact, here, even in California, for example, that is becoming an integral part of some of the state's energy objectives. Britain Organization plans are becoming very important for a lot of utilities. Thinking about the future, being very strategic, that uses smart technologies, but also enabling customers with greater control and value, because if customers have to engage in this whole energy future and smart investment, they have to believe in that and they need to see a value in it. Then also, you know, agility of the utilities, you know, typically a lot of times I hear that utilities are not innovative. You know, they move very slowly. You know, the agility becomes very important as you start into this digitizing the electric grid and moving the electric grid energy system into a digital grid. So that's why the customer-centric innovation is important. And finally, the electrification of transportation that I mentioned earlier. So when you look at what Exelon is trying to do from Lara Pierpoint's perspective, she really put a very good, you know, a relative view of what are some of the emerging infrastructure challenges that can be met by the emerging digital solutions. I won't go through all of those things, but I want to highlight some of the, you know, areas, especially, you know, the areas where machine learning, advanced intelligence, the visualization tools and data, you know, et cetera plays a very critical role in understanding what kind of investments and how those resources from the customer side could be leveraged for providing, you know, value to both the electric utility as well as to the customers.  So the insurgents are the new entrants, basically. We have an amazing amount of innovation happening in this industry right now, the startups, private equity, et cetera. Our aggressively pursuing the digital, you know, solutions market is how do utilities understand which is the right one and how they can capitalize on it to provide more value is going to be a very important question moving forward. From the Larry Beckett how, from the distributed resource planning, Larry did a great job in presenting the vision for Portland General Electric, but also looking at from, you know, how can we derive a system value from the electric grid perspective where you see on the right side and then customer value on the left side. You know, customer value can be different. The system value can be different, but how do we bring these together in a way that, you know, is considering the current grid with, you know, high renewable generation, deployment of the energy storage systems, you know, batteries, smart technologies and more engaged customers, et cetera. So all of those, I think, were very well represented by all the utility panelist members. And I couldn't be more grateful to have those kind of great minds together and describing their vision for, you know, grid modernization and digitization. Finally, is now taking those challenges that we presented earlier, how do we translate them into value? The value to the utilities to the grid and value to the customers both are equally important. Without one, you really will not have a very active engagement or sustainable practices. One of the area value is, you know, customer friendly, sustainable grid. Modernization roadmap came up very highly. Not just thinking about year from now, but thinking three years, four years, five years from now having strategies that allows you to get to that eventually. The effective automation technologies for customer resource flexibility. You know, when I say there are a lot of information technologies, but effective ones are the ones that can reliably and persistently provide you with the flexibility that considers customers needs very actively. How can we, you know, use those to provide value to the customers and to the grid? And also processes. You know, we're getting amazing amount of data into the grid, from the grid right now. And how do we better manage interoperability among the systems where some of the key value propositions that kind of came out. And then finally expanded market services and models.  So that's really a very critical step as well. Finally, I think where we need to go moving forward, and this is where we are going to be emphasizing quite a bit as part of this initiative, is how do you translate all of those value into strategies that benefit both the customers and grid? What do we need to do to really translate that how can we work collaboratively together? So with that, that was my last slide and back to you, Rean. Rish, this is Omar. Thanks, a great presentation. Quick question for you and just as a reminder for everyone else, please don't hesitate to go to the chat feature in the bottom if you'd like to ask a question for Rish or any of our speakers that come. Just one quick question. One of the earlier slides referenced infrastructure, utility infrastructure planning and then digital solutions. So for capital planning, how can utilities reconcile the longer-term time scales of infrastructure investments with the more rapid time scales of digital investments? So that's a good question. Omar, one of the things that at least I heard from the panelists the utility is linking the whole area of grid modernization with some business model. In a grid modernization whether it includes the aggressive renewables or enabling the transmission, making the transmission distribution system smarter even engaging customer resources with smart loads etc. How do we enable that with more grid modernization roadmap so that we are most utilities are more strategic and not reactive? I think that was one of the very important lesson there. The second one was linking the infrastructure. In past we have seen the infrastructure developments have been decoupled from the digital investments to a great extent especially when it comes to leveraging customer resources is start thinking those infrastructure investments along with digital investments as a collective offering. An example of that would be how do you leverage digital technologies to be able to better manage customer resources whether it's an electric vehicle or smart load etc. specifically from the T&D cost referrals or managing grid more reliably etc. So I think those were two very critical ones. Trying to think in terms of the utility specifically mentioning if I could quickly go to Emmer and Emmer mentioned that they have investment of close to 5.3 billion dollars in grid modernization or between now in 2019 to 2023 that's quite a bit of commitment putting dollars where you are talking about. So that was an important one but also if you look at the modernization strategy here that includes smart technologies that I think is a critical link between infrastructure investments and as well as linking them to the smart technologies but also from the excellent perspective I was very clear holistic grid and data technology assessments, technologies inclusion are very critical from meeting infrastructure investments like decarbonization goals etc. So how the utility investments can be made to enable such digital technologies to be integrated with the grid. And finally I mean Ellari I really love the slide that he put together is in designing the value from both the customer and system value how digital technologies that you see in the middle can provide that value from the investment perspective whether it's reliability investments operational efficiency investments coming from the utility and how you can take those investments in terms of digital enabling new digital technologies and deploying them in the grid that shows value both to the customer and to the system I think was an important one. Great, thank you Rich, why don't we move on to the next speaker Mahir Chepo so Mahir it's the floor is yours Hi, thank you so we did have an interesting session with the three panelist speakers from Ireland from France and from Sweden the first one is Miguel Ponsay de Leon he is technology gateway manager he spoke about a horizon 2020 when we say horizon 2020 is a program from the European Commission to fund research and innovation where there is a need to have different stakeholders, different representatives from different countries coming together and working on innovation projects so he spoke about a project called Sugno this was like the introduction and giving the foundation and setting up the scene for the rest of the panel this project Sugno is part of a program of a horizon 2020 as I said which is 80 billion of funding available over seven years from 2014 to 2020 and will be followed by another horizon which is called horizon Europe between 2021 and 2027 so Sugno addresses the topic of next generation innovative technologies enabling smart grids storage and energy system integration with an increasing share of renewables and distribution network and he presented that, he presented the findings actually around the work which took place the second speaker was Etienne Guillain and he is from NG he is digital innovation officer Etienne spoke about the digital work and digital transformation as a strategy at NG and what are the challenges and the opportunities they meet into the transformation and the fact they are moving from central polluting power plants to reduce the carbon based power plants and replace them by renewables or replace them by gas which is the least polluting from the hydrocarbon resources and then the third speaker was from Sweden Peter Söderström he is the head of the digital hub at Wattenfahl and he spoke about the whole strategy of Wattenfahl in terms of smart meeting first Wattenfahl Sweden was one of the top two countries in Europe who deployed smart meeting fully in the countries where they are present and where the regulator and Finland and now they are the second generation of re-rolling out the smart meeting again having both ways, communications and leveraging the latest technologies which were not available 10 years ago when the project took place so he spoke about that as a step as well to move from a smart meeting to the smart grids and what's the role for example the smart meeting would have to do the smart grids and then involvement as well in some European projects like future flow and other European projects as well which interconnects like future flow interconnects different TSOs together and then manage the cross border between these TSOs he spoke also about flexi-shency where Wattenfahl is actively participating and this is also in a project where the network companies come and put together some package data and services and then allow all the retailers aggregators and S-Cos to come and have access by being subscribers have access to this data and to the now I will go through the slides a bit to summarize that what they presented fit well with the overall work which is being done in Europe the digital grid and the customer centricity needs to have a simple one-stop shop universal and democratize access to energy and the need for that is to have access to all the suppliers that exist in the countries where they are all the European suppliers want to have a quick activation of any service they would require so one-stop shop universal democratize simplified and intuitive customer access all of that is important and leveraging the digitalization in terms of big data IoT, cloud data mobilization integration and the interoperability between systems that were designed not to talk to each other and make them talk to each other particularly the OT and IT systems, operational technology which is real-time and IT are systems like advice asset management or ERP systems so the grid operators have a lot of work to be done to make it simpler for the customers to have access to that so these speakers the vision and the work that took place on the last year at Europe converse the same thing is we need to make it simple for the customers as it is simple in telecom we need to put the customer not at the end but at the center of the overall value chain so this picture if you take the bubble which is in blue and you put it outside the planning you make it very complicated for the customer and this is why these representatives most of them from TSO or DSO or full integrated utilities they acknowledge and they talk about the importance of having a good integration between the networks and the markets and then bringing that together that if the customer wants like in telecom for example to access to any supplier or any service this gets activated immediately so this is why we speak about like one stop shop and universal access with both roles arrows here customer wants to have flexibility services they want even to access not only to customers who are providing services where you need the grid or the access to the grid but they could also require energy communities access energy community could run without the grid so everything which could be available in the country and all the players that are in Europe they could access them whether they are living in Paris or they are living somewhere else and so on and that will facilitate the access to the market to the openness of the market that will save also cost in terms of service activation by giving that doing that integration between the system operators and the markets through this integrated planning open very much the competition as well because everyone can play everywhere and then give the customers finally the awareness to play and to participate rather than looking at the energy as a commodity and participate and see bundles of services and everything they could access like in telecom they are really participating and they are really spending a lot of time to select the products and services they want these are all the stakeholders that would be involved from generation to grid when we speak about generation we speak about renewables of course the customers whether they are commercial customers or residential customers and it's important to involve also the startups because if you build a platform here where customers have full access to everything there is a lot of innovations and applications to be developed and it's whether it's NG or TSSG or ButtonFall or any player they are all working with startups and innovative companies to come in the game and finally the what I heard from the presenters they fit very well with this picture as there is research and innovation which is required in the system economics in the market structure and the new business models for example as I said to make energy evolve from a conservative behavior to a more advanced behavior if you are like the telecom industry which was conservative and monopolistic before to something where the private and the competition played an important role we need to change the business models including the aggregators we need to change the market governance we need to put also standardization of protocols in place in telecom in 12 years they designed the standard for mobile telephony for example we need to have standards that is a couple of mandates we need to select Etsy incorporation with NIST as well in the US work like the M441 for the smart meeting and the M490 for the smart grids these are important to consider and the importance of data information management cybersecurity and the end to end architecture digitalization will look as well into how to put that all together and take these different spare parts and to integrate them that we could do better planning and better system operations where we need also to involve with the digitalization the system operations particularly for the DSO networks that are not as sophisticated as smart as the DSO networks and to make them self-healing and with more advanced monitoring and control so I tried with this picture to bring actually the presentations and the point of use of the three speakers into a broader European picture here and saying look you know that all converge to that picture where we need the full integration between markets and operations and have the customers at the center of the picture thank you Thank you Mark, I appreciate it so you asked the excellent question in the end of the European utility panel but we didn't have a lot of time to discuss that and also you touch a little bit today on this slide which is kind of international collaboration and on the standards and also cybersecurity perspective so the question is what are the technology and business practice or business models that are transferable between US and European because we have different market structure and different business model and from your perspective what is the top three either technology or business model that are transferable? When we started and I was one of the co-founders of the smart grids initiative in Europe in 2005 we actually co-invented the name that didn't exist before smart grids we had an exchange with US groups like the group wise I remember they invited me to speak about what we are doing with the European smart grids and we exchanged very much around the reference architecture for the smart grids this is something which could be transferable software companies I think at that time was chaired by IBM companies like IBM or software companies like SAP and so on if they develop a reference architecture that could be transferable everywhere standardization work for the EV for the smart metering like based on the mandate M441 as I mentioned there was a cooperation on the standardization work between the Europeans something like Etsy who were working on that and the different experts around and this in the US to also reuse things and then when you develop cloud based models for example a project like Horizon 2020 Flexitiancy it's a kind of an Apple store for applications bringing together network companies and retailers, escos and aggregators so this kind of cloud platform where you could bring these actors together some of them publish data and package services others have access to that that could be also transferable digital batteries on the chair of the task force on digital batteries for Europe and a lot of the use cases we listed are also transferable actually we speak a lot about Tesla in the work that is being done in this task force everything around IoT for example or industrial IoT and the models that the data scientists develop related to the assets I can tell you these solutions work everywhere whether they are in Indonesia in Africa and Algeria in Europe or in the US so it is very important to have a global cooperation that we don't lose time and we exchange what could be good architectures or standards and we focus on accelerating the deployment of that everywhere thank you Maafat, really appreciate and next one we have a Nikola Pilmota from VMware are going to give us her perspective on the technology panel's conversation Nikola, your turn your turn good morning and good evening to everybody happy to be here to share the insights that we gleaned from our technology panel so the things that we covered the panelists covered is really the macro trends that we are seeing in the energy industry and also the buying side the challenges that the industry is facing and then finally the evolving enabling digital technologies that's happening there the panelists we have keynote speakers from Arun and David Tenenhaus which I'll try to weave into this overview and then our panelists were OP Ravi from Microsoft he's a principal program manager Principal Kadriah he's a global power sector for solutions design and internet of things and finally Rayford Smith's Google data center energy so very interesting conversations and I'll weave in what their comments were so first let's cover the macro trends and challenges that the industry is seeing so the first one is clearly that renewables are here to stay and Arun took us on a little bit of a nostalgic memory tour of and he discussed that in 2010 the Department of Energy had a moonshot program that had an aspirational goal of reducing the cost of solar to five cents a kilowatt hour without subsidies and I think at the time they thought this was just a BHAG goal but of course renewables are now some of the cheapest ways to generate electricity which is upending the utility industry in many ways then and then of course the least of which is that renewables is a variable supply and so and now of course distributed supplies are both bringing instability to the grid they're both very welcome improvements to the grid but they're bringing instability so in addition to the instability we have the rise of energy aware devices the needs for more resiliency in the face of storms and fires as Rich was saying decarbonization requirements economic supply and so this now really requires digital communications controllable demand, edge computing real-time analytics and of course not least end and cybersecurity layers alright the second trend is the demand shift from oil to electricity and again Arun noted that with the rising global demand for electric vehicles and the move to replace natural gas and heating with electricity there's a beginning of a massive shift from oil and gas to electricity and both of these are both are challenged and an opportunity to the utility industry he also pointed out that the rise in electric vehicles is really forcing an unforeseen and necessary collaboration between mobility industry electricity and IT sectors and I think we're going to see more and more of this across industries like manufacturing and even cities you know here the rise of smart cities and smart manufacturing enabled by AI machine learning IoT technologies the third trend is really the corporate demand for renewable energies and its acceleration but since about 2010 there's been a growing buying spree renewable energy by corporations in attempt to decarbonize their operations which is increasingly demanded by their customers, investors and employees and since about 2015 at least in the US corporations have outpaced utilities in renewable energy procurement which is I think something that nobody really first saw even 10 years ago so let's look at a couple examples of this is if you've not heard of RE100 if you go to RE100.org this is an organization that is getting companies to sign up for 100% renewable energy goals of their operations and generally this is their own internal operations and to date there's been 241 companies that have made this commitment another example is Science Based Targets which is an organization that is getting companies to commit to reducing their absolute carbon emissions in alignment with the Paris Climate Accord to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050 and what's interesting about the Science Based Targets is that it's not only the company's own operations but it's also in their supply chain which is something this is a very new development we've seen and it is really raising the bar for renewable energy procurement because that is one of the obvious ways for companies to reduce their energy consumption and you may think this may not be that interesting but now there are 900 companies signed up and I think there's probably 5 to 10 signing up every month this was about 400 companies back in the beginning of 2019 and just to give you some idea this is a significant subset of those 900 companies just to give you an idea that these are very large global marquee companies they're cross sector so this is not just a Silicon Valley high tech trend and Rayford talked a little bit about what Google's doing and I'll cover that later now let's talk about the so we have this challenge so we'd like to talk about the needs for the technology solutions and really what's happening so we got a taste of that from Principal Rayford and NOP seeing this opportunity the IT sector is rising to the challenge so key areas of innovation include infrastructure modernization that's obviously a very very broad topic support for automated dynamic distributed energy resources obviously distributed resource services and demand management and then of course needing to layer across that is an intrinsic cyber security which is a very big topic and finally the glue that holds all this together these technologies and brings them all together and enables them which is IT as we know artificial intelligence, machine learning to support the data analytics monitoring and insight and actions that are required in a digitized system and finally while it wasn't in the main presentation there was certainly discussion afterwards about the general recognition of the need for government regulatory policy and incentives to support and accelerate the transition to modernized and decarbonized grid my voice is a little froggy today so Prithpo discussed innovations happening at the edge to assist with optimization of integration of renewable energy and DERs including analytics and security for feeder optimization and this is quite an interesting slide so I'll just pause for a moment so you can hopefully you can see some of the details but it did include the use of distributed batteries to to be able to help with voltage and frequency management at the edge and the impact of the variable supply of DERs as well so another thing he pointed out was he provided insights into the modernized utility data center so representing substation automation in this case providing extensive control and monitoring for all of the required functionality and services that are needed at the edge and of course the intels of the world, the Hitachi the VMware's are all in the process of developing the technology and certifications that are required by the utility industry then moving on regarding demand management there's a lot going on in the area of of course EV charging control and also data center load optimization OP discussed some of the exciting work in the area of utility EV charging management including a joint venture between Microsoft Azure and ALEGO to develop a platform with capabilities that enable grid operators and energy suppliers to adapt to the energy demand on the grid that is represented by electric vehicles and the growing challenge that represents then Rayford focused on innovations going on in the world of data center load management a recent study led by Eric over in UC Santa Barbara estimated that data center electricity consumption is at about 1% of global energy supply or electricity supply however on the good new side as well demand for community has increased more than five and a half times from about 2010 to 2018 energy consumption has only increased 6% so these amazing efficiency and productivity gains really have relied heavily on hardware efficiencies at the server layer in the form of you've probably heard of Moore's law denared scaling and virtualization so we will need to look elsewhere for future efficiencies if we're to offset the inevitable and massive increases in computing demand that will be accelerated by the likes of AI, machine learning, IoT and edge computing but there's innovation happening in many areas including elimination of the massive amount of waste in IT infrastructure and freeing up stranded assets some more interesting work being done in shifting data center demand both temporally and geographically to when and where electricity supply is plentiful, cheap and low carbon and finally having a temporal matching of renewable energy supply and data center load so temporal matching of renewable energy supply and load is a new trend sort of the high bar set by corporations now in renewable energy procurement that's being led by Google and so we do expect this to be a significant trend over the next 5 to 10 years among corporate renewable energy buyers and then Rayford was sharing the work that Google is doing on the ladder which is the temporal matching between renewable energy supply and data center demand so this graphic shows the delta between the annual renewable energy supply of a wind project they have done in Chile and the data center load over that same time period so with the addition of additional wind and solar procurements that Google is doing in Chile they determined that it will be able to achieve 100% match or close to 100% match between the renewable energy supply and data center demand with those project procurements and then finally as I mentioned earlier the utility IT and academic sectors need to come together with a unified voice to support and incentivize and accelerate the transition to a modernized and decarbonized grid so that's a summary of what we covered in our amazing tech channel Thank you Nicola I really feel that we get one free so when we design this conversation and really focus on the customer integration then we invited all the technology panel is we expect them to talk about the grid technology like we heard IoT and machine learning, edge computing computing etc but we also learned a very interesting perspective is the data center and also the renewable procurement because you guys IT company also a customer DER you have a huge DER deployed how we can help you guys better integrate into the grid is something we can think about in the future so I have another question is we talk about different future connectivity of customer DER we heard cloud computing which is more like centralized all the information together and that is the edge computing which is more like distributed architecture so what are the potential cyber risks to this two different types of architecture or technology do we have like a one stop shop like Marker mentioned we have a secure solution for both architecture so unfortunately no but the good news is that's a very well recognized problem and of course corporations anybody who's using the internet today using edge using cloud on prem recognizes the problem and the idea is right now the very fragmented security market security solutions all over the place and it's all bolted on but there is a trend towards what's called intrinsic security and where it's building in security at the hardware layers the connectivity layers and then also the application layers so that you it's not an afterthought it's really seamless whether you're connecting between on premise machines or from on premise machine into the cloud or from a transformer station to a distribution station and so while we're not there yet I think the utility industry needs to continue to demand very high vigilance around cybersecurity for it's this new technology and that will drive attention to this within the IT industry perfect thank you so thank you all of you then with that I will hand this to you then let's get started with Q&A and a moderated conversation with all the three panelists today Oma great thank you and I do have a little bit of background noise that I can't escape so hopefully it's not too disruptive so great fantastic presentations we have one question that came in from the from the chat that I'll just read and it's open for any of the speakers could you share your thoughts about the plug and play model in the power distribution sector could we swap out old devices and plug in new ones without affecting the grid so general question but in the context of our discussion here any thoughts on that question if I may go ahead yeah yeah the requirement for example on the smart meeting connected to the grid every tender that went out in Europe 28 states that are part of Europe require to have an interchangeability between the meters so if you unplug for example a meter from Lendis and you put another one from itron it should continue to work so that was part of the requirements to have this plug and play model if you wish on some of these devices this is one example but there are also other examples of interchangeability for example between the devices any other thoughts on that Richard Nicola in my perspective I think at least hearing the panelists speak from the U.S. utility the answer depends when we say swap out old devices and plug in new ones without affecting the grid it depends on the type of device and who is plugging it in an example would be an electric vehicle right we may consider it as a device a charging unit a charging unit level 2 charging unit is anywhere from 6.6 kilowatt to 7.2 kilowatts and if you look at the average energy use in a residential building around 2 kilowatts peak you're more than doubling or tripling that load and if you don't have enough transformer capacity and if your neighbors start doing that it's a very different problem than saying okay I just bought a phone and I'm plugging in a new device a new phone at my home so it all depends on what kind of device that is and who is plugging it in and where within the grid system you reside but that's still a very important question you may not have a problem right now with one device but collectively when you aggregate these devices it may become a problem in fact we're seeing it has become a problem whether at the transmission level at the feeder level at the substation level etc so one of the things we are trying to do here at least that even John Hughes from Emmerin is looking into building a network that allows whoever is plugging in those devices to be able to communicate with the grid to really understand the impacts of it whether it's energy storage systems or just to be the generation etc and we're also working here in California on some interconnection rules for example the Rule 21 in California that enables more I would say safe and reliable connection of devices within the grid in a way that doesn't impact the electric grid but also enables utilities to manage that device if it is causing any good impact with all full engagement of the customers so I think it all depends on that the interoperability I think Meher mentioned interoperability there was also a very big highlight of one of some of the presentations that utility panelists did even here at EPRI we take that very seriously the standards interoperability along with the rest of the things that are covered so I would say absolutely it all depends but it's an important problem to start thinking about here just following up on that point on the topic of interoperability it's a question for all of our speakers here when we speak of integration of customer resources we're talking about a tremendous interchange of data between a number of entities customers, utilities technology providers third party providers and so on so how do we get to a level of standardization in terms of the data formats or other specifications of how the data is packaged and across platforms are the existing standards bodies and committees that are in place sufficient for the type of integration that we're seeking here or is there a need for some additional after perhaps some new committee or working group specifically around this theme so any thoughts on that around sort of data platforms and interoperability it's very complicated I don't think we are still there they have been a lot of work on the standardization as I mentioned some end dates on which a lot of experts work I mean in Europe there is a standardization body which is called SEN which makes standardization in different sectors and SENELEC is part of SEN and they work on standardization for their existing and then when it comes and involve data transfer and IT most of the time Etsy which is another organization for telecom and IT comes and work together with SENELEC for example and you can't imagine the number of experts who were involved in first defining what could be the minimum requirements for example for let's say the example of smart metering ten functionalities to say these are the minimum requirements for smart metering and then before that a lot of experts come together to say these are the minimum requirements for smart metering and after that there is a mandate which is issued and there is a request from SENELEC Etsy to work for example on the standardization but I'm not sure we still have today something like Air France architecture where it just you know you buy it it's already pre-configured pre-developed and so on and then you implement it if you want to move for example your old system to a new smart grid system there is a lot of interfaces I remember one of the working groups in the smart this was looking at the interfaces we did count like a hundred and sixty critical interfaces where the data goes back and forth and so on across the value chain and of course you have probability privacy as well and even if you you look at all the work that the IEC have been doing and so on I'm not sure it's that simple I'm not sure that complete today there have been a lot of work but we are still not there to make it simple everywhere there are also projects if you look at the EV charging there was a big European funded project 42 members called Green Emotion involving cities, car manufacturers utilities and so on they define a kind of a standard for the electrical vehicles across Europe that project has been executed a few years ago are we still there? Not yet because you know these are all new new sectors, new domains of expertise and there is also a lot of competition so there were people also and voices saying if you standardize something you give the competition an misunderstanding you could boost the competition if you standardize it at the right level of the detections but they still leave a space for example for the development of services property any other thoughts on that and then just to add to it another question that came in related around the kind of the custody of the data you know who owns that and you know is it if we're talking about customer device data is there sort of an agreement I would think it's more there are more kind of stringent rules in place in Europe as I understand Mahir about customer ownership of their device data and the privacy associated with that but just on the theme of interoperability and data custody it was said very clearly that customer's data is owned by customers every time you need to share this data and some customer should give them approval for that when it comes to access data for example eZemans or ABB or G providing equipments asset equipments to utilities like Duke Energy PSE and G or NL and so on they these customers who have turbines, wind turbines or networks they own the data that comes from these assets and if they want let's say on the digital side to get data from eZemans equipment and work with another software or other hardware they could they own this data because they paid for it and they asked for the equipments to be installed there as long as they don't infringe somewhere the security of the equipments provided by one vendor in principle they own the data and they could work they should not be trapped actually into one vendor so if an equipment provider has installed the equipments somewhere as one of the utilities it has absolutely the right when it comes to the data and the digitalization to work with anyone Omar we have a couple questions coming from the chat so again a reminder for audience I would encourage you type your questions through the chat and Omar and I will monitor this carefully and we try to combine some of the questions together so we have a very interesting question coming from the audience regarding now OCED country like India and some of Southeast Asia so we talk a lot about the US, European and how great our technology are so the question is what are your views on enabling digital tech for clean energy access in rural area of the world broader this a little bit what's your view of enabling digital technology and the business model to help clean energy access in the rural area in non OCED countries okay so I would take it I spoke a lot about the Europe and the European Commission with my role as a good chair and chair on the digital batteries and digital energy transition but I have also another role being the chair of the governing world of REAP energy and energy efficiency partnership which is focusing on low and mid income countries in the world typically in Africa REAP is in charge of executing on a project of a 60 million funded by the Swedish foreign ministry which has the objective to give energy access in many grid of grid to 5 million people in sub Saharan Africa Liberia, Mozambique and Burkina Faso and so far there are about 1 million people who have access to energy so there was a platform called Edison which you could access on internet anyone could access to that beyond the grid BGFZ BGFZ.Edison.org something like that and then you could see the dashboard in real time of how many new connections have been established when it's a new connection it's like a house that they could charge their mobile from the radio and light two rooms and there is about 150,000 connection equivalent to 850,000 people close to 1 million as I said in Zambia who got that already and there is now a rollout going in the other sub Saharan Africa countries so Edison collects the data from the new customers being connected and then follows the KPIs about who was the taxi the customer or the gender side was like 26% of women for example requested what's the carbon reduction because it's coming from renewables how many schools are equipped how many additional investments came in the game together with the de-risking investment coming from the Swedish foreign ministry and so on so it's very sophisticated it's all accessible on the web when you type beyond the grid for Zambia or beyond the grid for Africa BGFZ or BGF-A or REAP for example and you will find a lot of information about that very thick very short, Nikola I'm not sure if you want to add something here but I'll add a little bit in my engagement with some of the non-city countries like India for example is an important one I was involved in two former secretaries efforts to bridge some of the technology and knowledge transfer with India Dr. Steven Chiu who I admire immensely also from Stanford and Ernie Moniz who is now in the Energy Futures initiative it was very actively engaged in international cooperation as part of this initiative is to really address the decarbonization issues energy access issues etc with the what we call as emerging economies in the world in one of the things I've run in India close to two thirds of India is still in rural $340 million close to the population in the United States didn't have energy access so the initiative is like energy access in 24-7 power for all there are some of the key drivers to just provide energy access to these rural you know citizens but one of the things is also to better to understand is how do you provide the energy deriving a transmission distribution infrastructure is a very costly affair it may not work out is what we call as microgrids microgrids have existed in the United States and Western countries for a long time but microgrids are based on is an important one even in India we have microgrids in every home powered by diesel generators a lot of offices because of lack of reliability they have diesel generator microgrids driving those microgrids in a way that allow a more resilient community whether it's one rural area or a village or to the other and the second thing was innovation in the cost and business model and services how do you incentivize people because you know vendors may not be willing to sell technologies when there is not too much of profit coming out of it but how do you make this into a very innovative business policy the bankability aspects of it some of the components some of the things that we looked at other than DOE even US aid for example there is a tremendous amount of work in advancing some of the international development in this phase but I would say the technology knowledge transfer activities are very critical one thing at least I have learned from my father who is a teacher is too short to make your own mistakes is the same example we have done it we have seen it how the emerging economies can learn and implement it in a sustainable way it becomes an important one and second becomes the cost and how do you make it cost effective because the countries may not be in a position to spend the same amount of money making it very cost effective and affordable because it's a very critical aspect Terrific any questions from your end Nikolai anything you want to add before we jump to the next question No I'm good thanks Just to add there is on what we have seen with the panelists and so on and what I just heard the evolution between like giving energy access for example from renewable batteries and so on when connecting them into micro grid or mini grid and then connecting them to smart meters and connecting them to the grid so there is like a maturity model between if you are giving access to energy to someone and how you can connect that to the rest of the grid and it's very interesting to look into that and moving from the low and income priorities to something that are in more in the developed countries for example how to make the grid smarter and how the grid can connect a big number of micro grids or mini grids in Africa there is about 10,000 mini grids potential projects Great so I have a question and again as Liang said please if you all who are listening in please don't hesitate to type in your questions in the chat feature and we will read it for our speakers to address I have a question just on you know the points been made by several of you about the importance of the customer keeping the customer at the forefront Mahir as you pointed out but how do we you know with all the potential of these technologies on the customer side of the meter to provide some value in terms of flexibility and serving other grid needs how do we align customer interests with the utilities for grid flexibility so you know in other words things like time dependent pricing mechanisms enough if not how else can utilities engage with customers to not only incentivize the adoption of you know things like solar and electric vehicles storage advanced controls but also their use and the ability for them to be or to allow their dispatch to fulfill grid flexibility needs so what can be what's in it for the customer or can be made appealing to the customer disrespect open for all maybe Nicola starting with you and then going through all of our speakers yeah well I think historically you know uses of electricity have been seen as rate payers not customers and that's very different from the private sector but the idea is just what value can be provided and so companies are looking for resiliency economy efficiency decarbonization so I think to the extent that utilities can see that as a value added services that they can provide that do have value to the customers and they're willing to pay for that I think it's a just a new way to look at how they it's not just about delivering electrons anymore okay my hair rich yes I think I think go yeah if you are in a non competitive market you would say that when the side of the utility is putting in place programs to reduce consumption you would say this would contribute to less revenues for them unless they are really stuck and during the peak demand they have no other option because there is not enough capacity really putting in place programs like California for example has put that into shifting the load and asking people to consume when there is off peak but in competitive markets if you think that way you will be out of business because others will do it so there is competition and you need to provide to the customers the classical way to consume bill and brings you a lot of revenues as a retailer and at the same time giving the opportunity to consume less to consume differently to consume clean and so on even if this is sometimes reducing your revenues but you have to think about diversifying you have to rethink your business model and you have to think there are other competitors if you don't do it they would do it and this is the game and all the retailers for example in Europe where the market is open since 1st of July 2007 has absolutely understood okay great Rich any thoughts you'd like to add yeah I think a couple of things I think from that perspective Mark a very good question I would say at two levels one is we need to start thinking beyond TOU you know for a long time a majority of customers in the United States have flat rates right like residential we had a TOU and more dynamic rates depending on the utility for large commercial industrial customers but for residential it had been major majorly flat rates but that is changing slowly for example you know just a year and a half ago we California translated into TOU rates for residential customers right and that was a very important move in engaging customers to flexibly manage their loved if I have an option to charge my electric car not as soon as I come home at 6pm or 7pm from work but charge at 11pm because my car would be still charged when I wake up in the morning and be able to drive back to work I would be happy to do that if it is incentive for me to do it and it also helps the grid as well as me and the second thing I think it's important to go beyond TOU is moving into more dynamic pricing you know the whole area of demand response is requires so much of customer engagement and assessment of policies that is you know making it more revenue neutral for electric utilities so why would they ask customers to lower their electricity used when their business model is built on more selling more electricity isn't a fundamental question so that needs to be answered so making that revenue neutral through rate based program has been able to create tariffs to engage customers but if you move more towards more dynamic rates and even more renewables in the grid and gfg emissions etc embedding them in the whole you know dynamic pricing rates and encouraging the second level is embracing innovation and technology I think that is also very critical where vendors are now developing optimization models and technologies that you know we never had this net or communicating charging infrastructure etc even four or five years ago like we have what we have right now adopted at scale so I would say those two will play a very important role in how well can you create dynamic pricing policies and embrace those dynamic pricing policies through market mechanism and second is technology innovation great thank you Leigh-Anne I'll back over to you great we have about six minutes left so we have a very interesting question here I'm going to combine this question with some of my personal interests here so the question is for the compared to the IT sector the utility industry is kind of a little bit laggy industry and because the technology moving very fast on the IT sectors and when we talk about the standardization how the standardization process in the utility sector when we do the digital transformation can keep the same pace as the IT sector quick example is my car the Tesla car has always has a software update almost every month or two the phone we have if we want to control the NAS or whatever is keep updating the iOS on the Android platform every several weeks right and if we look at the history a quick example is a smart meter is AMI we still use the Webmax as one of the key communication to translate the data between the router to the hub and we've heard a lot of great technology and how we can keep the pace and how the IT technology can involve the business not just the technology transition but also the business model transition on the utility sector yeah this is a a comment or a question it's a hybrid question the one is standardization how do we keep the pace and the second one is more like how the IT the good technology can involve the business model transition for the utility sector yeah so first of all the first competitor to software companies or digital industrial providers are the utilities themselves because they understood that data is very important they need to keep control not only control this is also a high margin compared to the to the hardware business so they have set up teams, budgets a company like NL which is probably the one of the the largest utilities in the world 70 million customers they have a budget of more than 5 billion for digitalization 83% of that budget is being spent on the distribution networks they understood that they have put in place teams like in Tel Aviv with innovation and funneling and working startups and so on they develop digital twins themselves they have projects in Brazil and everywhere in the world but on top of that they have also a structure to have for distribution networks the full responsibility worldwide where they could put digitalization across this whole business so they understood it now of course you need distributors to come together and transmission companies to come together in Europe the association of transmission has a collaborative program among the 40 TSU members to build a digital platform where you could plug things through APIs and so on on the digital platform in a consistent standard way for everyone and to the other thing like the example of Tesla and operating system still we are not there but of course we are talking about having kind of an operating system for energy very easy for customers and so on at least at the European side and we take the example of Tesla on batteries we speak about the same thing and so on this is because Tesla had a great vision and he understood that a car could be like an iPhone and they could have great things and provide things without changing your car and that's for me it's a good vision as well to think about it for the energy sector. Just a quick comment I think considering the time in 30 seconds I think utilities are embracing digital transformation we have seen that in the presentation that all the US panelists made an example is investment in the private LTE network investment in participating in standards organizations but it will take time the IT industry is pretty fast in the nimble industry utility has a lot of regulations, a diverse set of players so it's not as easy as to change as an IT industry might have but we are seeing that trend I think that is an important and encouraging aspect of it utilities are very active in the standards work you know we have seen at least here at EPRI you know utilities it's on most of the standards development organizations effort but for energy store systems electric vehicles demand response right et cetera so they are very actively participating in embracing those because they have started to realize enabling cost effective integration of the distributed resources and leveraging them to provide new services to the utility will play a very critical role but so if I have to put standardization you know at three levels going back to the other questions previously you know Ernie Moniz said the famous innovation cycle invention, translation, adoption and diffusion, adoption is early stage and diffusion is a market scale you know the standards are at each of these three levels we have to constantly innovate and invent new areas that we need but there are standards that are ready to be adopted you know things like what we are doing at rule 21 for swatting murderers in order base distributed resources example but there are standards that are ready for adoption things for automated demand response you know the IC standards that are there in the grid IC61 1968 the common information model et cetera are very important aspects that you can take and adopt so I would say yes it's been uphill climb and I know for a good reason because the climb is uphill but at the same time utilities are embracing digital technologies great we are right here at the end and unfortunately I know we could probably go on but with respect for everyone's time we should conclude here so Liang let me on behalf of Stanford and Epri thank Nicola, Mahir and Rich outstanding presentations great conversation thank you all for attending and for your questions please tune in next week for the second in our weekly webinar series have a great rest of the week and we look forward to talking to you again soon thank you thank you all I appreciate it bye


Thank you. So, yes, I've been a PyPy co-developer for a long time and I've had to think a lot about C extensions while working with PyPy and that's a bit of a problem for us dealing with extensions and that's how the PyPy project came about. So, first let's talk about C extensions. As you all know, they are central in the Python ecosystem. Of course we all love to program in Python but also we all love having available powerful libraries that enable all sorts of things including sending a telescope to space and analyzing the vast amounts of data it produces and that is all based on extensions like NumPy which uses the C API directly but also I can think of libraries like Pandas or Scikit-learn which use mainly Cyton and so don't interact with the C API directly but use a tool instead but Cyton does clearly rely on the C API and you also have other possibilities to write extensions in statically compiled languages you can use C++ with well you can use it directly or you can use PyPy 11 you can write the extensions in Rust but all of that relies on the C API so by the way I'd like to know in the room how many people have used C API directly quite a lot and how many people have written extensions in general about the same so to go back to PyPy and I mean in general in the Python ecosystem there's I guess one big drawback of Python and its performance that's why we reach out to different languages when we need performance and there is there are a lot of attempts to get better performance so you have PyPy and but also grow Python which has a somewhat similar approach to PyPy that completely re-implement the core of Python and then the problem becomes how do you deal with the C API because you're not even using C in the core so in that case you have to emulate the C API and that's that's quite difficult as I know but you also have other alternative implementation of Python that started off C Python so well the folks of C Python so should be easy to to keep supporting the C API except that obviously they fork to change things and they want to change the core of the interpreter so then they have to make a trade-off between keep supporting the C API or doing the changes they want to change and another way to to improve performance is inside the C Python itself there is nowadays a lot of focus on performance so you have of course the faster C Python project which well has to tries to change the internals but it's C Python they can't afford to break the existing extensions and and another project to improve performance is this time to deal with concurrency allowing several interpreters inside the same process but that runs into issues with the C API as well so let's talk about the problem the problems with the C API it's well first of all the C API is quite old it pretty much goes back to the the origins of Python and it kind of grew because people started using the internals of C Python to to write interesting extensions such as the ancestor of NumPy started I think in 1995 and over time the C API got formalized but it remained close to its origins as just exposing directly exposing the internals of C Python and because of that the the layout of the of the built-in objects is part of the C API like if you have if you have a float object you can directly access the the member that contains the value and well you're not supposed to do that but you can't prevent extension writers from doing it also the C API started at a time where concurrency wasn't even an issue to see before multi-threading and it's when you call a function from the C API it often reaches out to global interpreter state things such as I know you can do imports and touch system modules or you depend on the encoding and the and also because there are so many extensions out there every time you make a change you break someone's code and to go into a bit more technical details the fact that the API is based on pointers everything is basically a py object star that you pass around and because of that well you have to be able to dereference this thing that you pass around and well if you had a bit of an interaction you could do interesting things such as pointer tagging where you like encode directly into where you use the low bits of a pointer to encode a different information or you could have you could represent say lists of floats or integers by storing just the value instead of having to always have a full-blown object present and and I said it's hard to change they have been attempts to alleviate that but so there is a stable a bi but it has some issues it's not used a lot and I guess that's because it exposes too little like people want things that aren't in the stable a bi but at the same time it's not that stable because there are actually a lot of things that shouldn't have been part of the stable a bi but got put in by accident and the big issue and the central motivation for for each pie is that the reference counting semantics of C Python are crucial to to use the DAPI so let me explain the issues with ref counting specifically by contrasting it with the approach used by Pi Pi but also a great graph Python which is to have a tracing garbage collector so in with reference counting you every single object keeps track of the number of references to it that exists and so you know that when this ref count goes to zero you can delete the object by contrast the tracing GC just records the the edges in in the object graph records which objects refer to which and and figures out that way which objects are alive and which objects are dead and the the issue with reference counting is that basically every time you want to read an object you have to write to the to the ref count field so that that turns every read into a right which is bad for for cash which causes a lot of issues once you start to think about concurrency and that's basically the reason we have the guilt because we need to change this ref count every time we well we need to have a lock so instead of locking every single object we we have the global the global log so what is H by going to do about that so let me start by a bit of history the project started three years ago exactly so it was in in Basel at the last Euro Python and a few Pi Pi developers had had gathered to discuss again but the all these issues and after talking with some C Python and site and death we decided to to create H Pi so since then we've had a lot of interest from the developers of crawl Python which have exactly the same same issues and we well we agreed on this set of goals so get rid of reference counting but also make sure that there is no implicit state make the global state explicit but at the same time we wanted to be want to make the transition as easy as it can possibly be so the new API must not have any overhead on the C Python and we also want to provide new possibilities such as having what we call universal binaries meaning you compile your extension once and it works on all the interpreters and all the versions and also we have tools to help writing extensions with it with H Pi and so to accomplish this goal on C Python there are two modes you can either have well there are basically two versions of H Pi in C Python one which is basically just a set of headers that translates into call that translates it calls into H Pi functions to calls into C Python functions so you only need it you only need H Pi at compile time and the result is an extension that behaves like something you've written against the C Python API but the other mode in the other mode you have an H Pi runtime that implements the same API on all implementations of Python so that the extension only need to calls into the runtime and depending on the interpreter will have you'll get different implementation and with this approach we can also provide a special runtime that offers improved debugging so here's what H Pi looks like very simple code you just include H Pi dot H well there's some there's a macro to simplify the boilerplate but and this in this API call well you see it's almost like in I think in C Python it's by number absolute and said you write H Pi absolute and all functions in H Pi take an H Pi context argument which presents a global state and and these H Pi objects which are the handles so the handles are individual references to an object so meaning that you can have two handles pointing to the same object but they will be different different objects have different values at the C level and now instead of doing an ink ref on an object you duplicate the handle and with that it means that you can match precisely every time you create a handle or duplicate it you need a matching H Pi close and that actually makes programming a bit easier because you can clearly match where the object is created and where it's when you don't need it anymore so going a bit into details there are three kinds of handles the H Pi are only for short lived references so it's for the local variables we use something different for storing objects and that is really helpful for garbage collectors now the context it looks like this so you have a place to store private data well version we don't use it at the moment but the context stores a bunch of built-in objects or handles built-in objects and it stores the whole ABI of H Pi like there's a whole bunch of function pointers and all of H Pi is implemented by calling this context so when you have a function in the in H Pi it's really doing CTX arrow CTX model create and also the this context can implement a debug mode which by the way doesn't need to be recompiled it's the debug mode is just a different context so I just need to say H Pi debug equals one set an environment variable and then you have debug information on on leaks on uses of invalid handles and also same thing for memories that's returned by the interpreter and because we have like only one place where the handle is created we can know if there's a leak we can know precisely which which handle leaked with so which function is responsible for the leak so to convert existing extensions you have to first the one thing you do in staying with the Python it's by only supports hip types so you have to do that first and then it's straightforward translation of type specs and model specs to H Pi and then you can actually do the port which you can do function by function or method by method and we've built a few prototypes inside the H Pi so we have you Jason my thought live which is the Kiwi solver and an attempt at NumPy so to conclude we H Pi is not ready yet and but it will be soon hopefully we still need to implement all of the myriad functions from the C API we also need to solve the packaging problem because at the moment these universal binaries are loaded loaded using a hack in these utils we need to be able to provide wheels we're still on our version 004 so we are not actually a BIS table but the mechanisms are in place and finally another thing we'd really like to have is allowing people to just write each by extensions without knowing it through sighting and possibly other tools so thank you for listening yes thank you very much we have time for one or two questions please ask your questions at the microphone yeah hey nice talk you have said on slide 5.1 that people could that the problem with C Python is for example that you cannot really do pointer tagging so my question is what kind of information would you actually store in the pointer tag because well that could be for example types right but you may have like tons of types and then probably you will not have that much yes well it's depends on the implementation actually this pointer tagging is already implemented in the HPI version for Gral Python so they have well when you do a pointer tagging you well you know that your pointers are you basically take a pointer and you take some of the bits that aren't really unused yes you use this to store some information yes but you have if you you can store a tag on the last few bits so say the last four and no for me three and if the the low bits are not zero then you interpret the rest of the pointer as something so you can store a lot of integer values you can even store floats if you want my question like specifically is about like what kind of information are you storing there because you said that HPI is using actually it it's used on Gral Python so I don't know all the details but I think they can store integers floats and some well-chosen built-in objects like non true false kind of thing and that already removes a check for those yes we have time we have time for one small question short question maybe you can discuss the other question with him later sorry I didn't hear you does only target Python 3 or does it target Python 2 oh it's only a Python 3 at the moment it supports I think from sweet point 3.6 to 3.10 on C Python on Python Gral Python so need the last version yes well thank you very much please give him another