Hello and welcome everyone to our briefing today, leveraging grid edge integration for resilience and decarbonization. I'm Dan Bresset, the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. ESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change topics to policymakers. More recently, we've also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. ESI works hard to provide informative, objective, nonpartisan coverage of climate change topics and written materials and on social media. All of our educational resources, briefings like this, fact sheets, issue briefs, articles, newsletters, and now even podcasts are always available for free online. And we are always posting new information. Just yesterday, we published a new issue brief about the potential for autonomous vehicles as a climate solution. And readers of our bi-weekly climate change solutions newsletter were treated on Tuesday to new articles about the major funding and leverage increase proposed by the Biden-Harris administration for USDA's Rural Energy Savings Program and also the planned phase down of hydrofluorocarbons. I really cannot imagine why anyone interested in climate policy is not already a subscriber to climate change solutions, but I suppose you never know. So just in case, a plug, the best way to keep track of our work and access our resources is to visit us online at www.esi.org and sign up for climate change solutions. And it also helps if you follow us on Twitter at EESI online. Today is the third and final installment of our new briefing series, Modernizing the US Energy System, Opportunities, Challenges, and the Path Forward. We started on June 4th by imagining the infrastructure investments needed today to strive towards the energy system of tomorrow. And on June 11th, we focused our attention on Modernizing America's Transmission Network. If you missed either of these first two sessions, you can watch the archived webcast if you visit us online at www.esi.org. Our session today, Leveraging Grid Edge Integration for Resilience and Decarbonization was originally scheduled for last Friday, but out of respect and observance for the new Juneteenth holiday, we moved it ahead to today. So thank you very much for your understanding with our change of plans. And thanks for joining us today. As it worked out by coincidence, given all the recent developments in infrastructure discussions and the importance of greenhouse gas emissions reductions and whatever set of packages come together, our topic is even more timely than we had hoped. And also joining us today is a very special guest to help us kick off the discussion. It is my privilege to introduce Representative Peter Welch of Vermont. After distinguished service in the Vermont State Senate, Representative Welch was elected to the House of Representatives in 2006. Today, he is a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. He is a tireless champion of energy efficiency, and he has a true gift for finding areas of bipartisan agreement across a wide range of policy areas. So let's welcome Representative Welch to our webcast today. Thank you, Dan Brissette, and thank you, Environmental and Energy Study Institute, for allowing me to say a few words. This meeting you're having about the climate change we face on climate change in a bit of context. The last administration, there was a lot of denial as though climate change didn't exist as though it wasn't a threat. In fact, people knew it was a threat and knew it existed. The whole back was a lot of fear about what would happen as we face the challenge of moving from a carbon-based economy to renewable energy and an efficiency-based economy. And those of you who are here understand there's immense economic opportunity in taking on the challenge to implement this transformation that our country and our environment and our world needs. And it is by facing the challenge, not by denying it, that we're actually gonna create a stronger economy. And what's exciting to me as a member of Congress with all the challenges that we face is that that's the side of the environmental debate that we're on, how to do it, how to do it in a way that's effective to create stronger communities, better local jobs. And you're on the forefront of doing practical things to allow us to reduce carbon emissions as we create jobs. So you're on the forefront and it's exciting. And the challenges are real, they're immense and they take a talent and they take discipline and they take cooperation. But I'm seeing that we're getting some bipartisan support finally for some of the measures we need to take. I'm working with Representative McKinley from West Virginia on our hopes for homes effort, make our homes much more energy efficient by providing some tax incentives, but then the know-how, how to do it, the connection with the web, how that's gonna interact and keep down carbon emissions, who's gonna do the jobs? That's all gonna be the private sector with practical folks coming up with practical solutions. We need a renewable energy standard and I'm not introducing legislation with my friend from New York, Representative Clark. And that's gonna create a lot of incentive for our utilities to engage and faster with renewable energy. So I'm seeing that there is an increase in real interest in Washington on the policymaker's side to provide those policies that give you the tools that you need to use the grid edge efforts that you're making that are going to reduce carbon emissions and help us finally address aggressively climate change from carbon emissions that have to be reduced. So thank you so much for the work that you do. Thank you for allowing me to say a few words and I look forward to being your partner in this important work that we must face together. Thank you. That was great. Thank you so much Representative Welch for joining us today. It's always really great to see you and I look forward to when we can welcome you back at in-person briefings which hopefully won't be too much longer into the future. And also let me just say a quick thanks to your excellent staff who helped us arrange for your participation in our briefing today and they're just about the nicest and easiest people to work with on Capitol Hill. So thanks to you and thanks to them for joining us. And now after hearing from Representative Welch I feel like we can move right to the panel. As usual, we will leave time at the end of our session for some discussion. And if you have a question or comment in our audience today let us know. You can send us your questions two different ways. The first is by sending us an email. The email address is EESI at EESI.org. You can also follow us on Twitter at EESI online. And if you send us your question we'll do our best to incorporate your input into the conversation. And now let me introduce the first of our four panelists today. Monica Newcomb is the Technology Manager for Grid Interactive Efficient Buildings or GEB in the Energy Department's Building Technologies Office. She holds a master's degree in Public Policy, Energy and Public Finance from the University of Maryland and a bachelor's degree in Business Administration from the University of Oregon. Welcome Monica. When you turn your video on it will be great to see you and I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Thanks Dan. And thanks to EESI for having me on today and excited to be able to provide a quick update here on the National Roadmap on Grid Interactive Efficient Buildings. I'll just be saying GEBs from now on that we recently published. Hope you are able to check out the report. We have the website right here or you can download it and read through a pretty short actually report with quite a few details in the appendix. And I just want to also give credit to the authors of this report, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the Brattle Group or the primary authors of the report. So I'm going to go through just a quick introduction sort of of what is a GEB, why GEBs? And then I would walk through two of sort of the key elements of the report. One key aspect of the report was analysis. So we'll give a quick update on that and then we'll walk through some of the key recommendations of the report as well. So what is a grid interactive efficient building and why do we need them? Really, you know, at BTO where I work the building technologies office, we've spent a lot of our time focused on energy efficiency. And I'd say for about the last five years we've really looked to broadening energy efficiency to also be thinking more about load management. So in addition to reducing the overall energy efficiency also looking to see when you can change the timing of your energy, the amount of it and also sort of when you can modulate or quickly shift some of the energy use. And we're finding the need to do that really that was, we started expending our work based on stakeholder feedback. A lot of the states who are working are exploring and you know, really see that the supply changing with growing share of variable renewable energy really see the need for a solution also on the demand side through greater load management. And in addition to renewables, there's also just increasing trends towards decarbonization goals and greater electrification through vehicles and even building equipment that will also really require better demand side management. And then in addition to those trends, just the overall ability through demand flexibility and energy efficiency to reduce costs, replacing aging system infrastructure and improving system reliability. And then definitely not last, but it's the last of my list here from the consumer perspective, in addition to reduce electricity bills, also just greater options for control of building equipment. Demand flexibility really requires more controls in equipment. So then that allows essentially, consumers to have smart buildings and are able to control their equipment and have sort of better ability to align with their preferences. So we go to the next slide. We can get a little bit more of the details of what is a GAB, all right. So the definition really, or the vision that we work on at BTO of a GAB are energy efficient buildings with smart technologies that are characterized by the active use of distributed energy resources to optimize energy use for grid services, occupant needs and preferences and cost reductions in a continuous and integrated way. So that's a very long definition that has a lot packed into it. But really our vision is one of, where buildings are more automated and are able to respond to signals to change the energy use. So as I mentioned, the GAB really the foundation of it is efficiency and reducing the amount of energy that's needed to operate the building in a persistent way. But then in addition, being connected and most buildings are connected today to the grid but we're looking for a GAB really to a communication where a building is able to receive a signal and then also respond back to the grid. And then in addition to being connected, the building really needs to have a system or equipment that is smart. So they're able to do sensors and controls, take in signals or be able to optimize for different preferences or needs in order to allow for that shifting or shedding of energy use. And then lastly, a GAB is flexible. We're really looking at sort of traditional building equipment along with DERs and storage and optimizing all that in order to reduce shift or modulate energy use. So that was just a quick overview of what is a GAB? And so then moving on to, we wanna move to the next slide, the different elements of the actual roadmap. So the next two slides, I'm gonna talk through just the overall potential or sort of the analysis that we found through the roadmap. So the top line finding is that GABs can save between 100 to 200 billion in power system costs by 2040. The range in benefits is driven by different assumptions about future adoption rates and future energy and capacity costs. So we looked at low, mid and high adoption and reports. Most of the findings are focused on sort of the mid adoption perspective. Between roughly half and three quarters of the total system benefits come from reduced energy costs driven largely by the energy savings of energy efficiency measures and avoid or to defer generation and transmission capacity costs due to reductions in system peak demand account for the vast majority of the remaining benefits. You'll find in the report the slightly lower costs or the lower system value of GABs under the high renewable case is due to lower marginal energy costs and the associated reduced benefits from energy efficiency. However, in that case, demand flexibility benefits for more variable energy costs through greater opportunities to shift load from higher cost hours to lower cost hours. I think that's a good summary for that slide. So we move to the next one. We also quantified the benefits from an emissions perspective. And on a national basis, GABs would reduce the national CO2 emissions by roughly 80 million tons or 6% of total power sector emissions annually by 2030. The primary driver of the emissions reductions is the decrease in fossil fuel based electricity generation due to lower overall electricity demand. Additionally, changes in the timing of electricity consumption through demand and flexibility measures and technologies can result in proportionally more electricity being consumed during hours with lower emissions. For instance, middle of the day in a utility system with high solar deployment. We also found, as you can see here, significant regional variation. Regions that are more reliant are on carbon intensive generation resources such as the upper Midwest, or which do not have plans to serve new loads through cleaner resources that will provide a greater opportunity for emissions savings through energy efficiency and demand flexibility. And then I also just note that emission benefits were somewhat conservative because the demand flexibility measures were controlled and dispatched to reduce the cost. If, in the analysis that we had dispatched, the demand flexibility measures to optimize emissions reductions with benefits would be greater. So if we move to the next slide, or the next few slides then are just gonna go through recommendations for a celebrated GEB adoption. The report looks at four different pillars. Pillar one is looking at advancing GEBs through research and development. Pillar two is enhancing the value of demand flexibility to consumers. Pillar three is looking at empowering people and users. And then pillar four really looks at supporting demand flexibility through enabling programs and policies. So I'm gonna get into details on each of these. The pillar one, looking at research and development, there are three key recommendations here. And then on the slide, I have an example action. I'm not gonna read through all of these but just I'll quickly take through the recommendations. The first one is really looking at continuing to do research around GEB technologies. In particular there, there's a real opportunity around thermal energy storage as well as looking at HVAC systems. We find there's a really good connection between load management and electrification. And so that will be an area of continued focus for BTO. Also critically important to all this is interoperability. There's this consistently we hear this across from all stakeholders really the need to make sure that the technologies are interoperable and focusing on developing standards around that. And then the last recommendation here is just making sure that we're able to provide data and access the data with increased benchmark data sets and benchmarking tools. So we move to the next slide, pillar two. So this is really looking at enhancing the value proposition from both the consumer and utility perspective. And the first two recommendations here improve and expand innovative customer demand flexibility program offerings and consumer knowledge and consideration of price based programs are really making sure that there are incentives in place for people who want to have their homes their offices or buildings to actually participate and provide the demand flexibility. Today there really aren't very many incentives in place and there needs to be an increase in this in order for people to offer up demand flexibility. And then the last two recommendations here are looking for providing incentives for utilities to want to deploy demand flexibility and then incorporating demand flexibility and utility resource setting. We believe that these two elements from a utility perspective would really help increase overall sort of market participation. The third pillar in my opinion is just so critical empowering people to better understand how to interact with smart technologies. And critically here, this last recommendation is focusing on the workforce. This goes all the way from installation of the sort of sensors and the system that allow for more of the automation to people actually then whether in commercial buildings being able to use the equipment and sort of understand the data analytics that are driving some of the changes. And then the ongoing maintenance whether it's contractors coming in to fix the technology or just people at home being able to maintain the technology. We feel like this is a really critical piece that needs to be worked on in order for people to really be more comfortable with smart buildings in order to optimize all that they have to offer. And then the last pillar is looking at increasing deployment through state and federal programs and policies. The first one here lead by example we found a lot of benefits from energy efficiency and we think that we can expand from those programs to include demand flexibility be a great way to sort of increase trust in demand flexibility. There definitely needs to be increased funding and financing for GED technologies. We know a number of states are looking at expanding codes and standards to also incorporate demand flexibility and then just also states considering sort of incorporating demand flexibility in targets and mandates as well to help increase demand flexibility to just be more common in programs. And then last but not least end on in this report DOE has established a goal of tripling energy efficiency and demand flexibility by 2030 and relative to 2020 levels. And we stand ready to work with states and a number of stakeholders. Right now we have three working groups one with states another with utilities and then a third with commercial building owners and we plan to continue and expand on those efforts. One of the things that in the report through the recommendations for each of the recommendations we would call out sort of the key stakeholders that are really critical to the success of the recommendations. So just wanna end that we're excited to continue this work at DOE and working with all the key stakeholders who are necessary to really accelerate demand flexibility for the future. That's a great kickoff presentation for our panel today, Monica. Thank you so much for joining us. And just a quick plug, Monica's presentation covered grid interactive efficient buildings but it's almost impossible to find work at the building technologies office that will not deliver a ton of cost effective emissions reduction. So folks in our audience, I hope you'll go back and look at Monica's presentation and visit the links that she recommended and take a moment to peruse the office of energy efficiency and renewable energies building technologies office, building energy codes appliance and equipment standards building America asset score. There's a ton of cool work going on at the Department of Energy around buildings and emissions reductions. I just encourage everyone to go take a look at it and it's very cool stuff. And Geb is especially cool but there's just a ton of great stuff going on at BTO. So thank you so much, Monica for joining us today. I now get to introduce our second panelist. Eleon Bitar is currently an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. Prior to joining Cornell in fall 2012, he was engaged as a postdoc fellow in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Science at the California Institute of Technology and at the University of California Berkeley in electrical engineering and computer science. Eleon, it is wonderful to welcome you to the panel today. I really can't wait for your presentation. I'll turn it over to you. Thank you very much, Dan. Thank you to everyone else at ESI for the kind invitation. Yeah, no, it's an opportunity to speak to everyone out there in the YouTube land. But let me share my screen. So today I'll spend a little bit of time discussing the impacts that electric vehicles will have on the grid as we transition to a greater reliance on EVs for transportation. We'll talk about different possible futures related to how we manage the integration of electric vehicles. And I'll discuss the enormous potential that electric vehicles might provide in terms of, to the grid, in terms of serving as assets, as resources that can improve the efficiency, the resilience and the sustainability of our power systems. So electric vehicles are coming. I mean, you may have been hearing a lot about this in the news, both in terms of various automakers pledging to completely electrify their fleets in the coming years. GM has said that they'll go all electric by 2035. Volvo similarly has said that they'll go all electric by 2030. And many other automakers are investing heavily in terms of R&D to increase their ability to electrify their fleets and manufacture, producing batteries to build these vehicles. So today electric vehicles, they're really a tiny fraction of all vehicles on the road. They're roughly 2%, they represent 2% of all new vehicles sold in the United States today. But the rate of adoption is accelerating and it's going to accelerate very aggressively. And this is driven primarily by declining costs. And that's really due to declining battery costs. In this figure here, I've plotted the battery costs from 2013 to 2020 and you see per kilowatt hour, battery costs have decreased from roughly $600 per kilowatt hour to $137 per kilowatt hour. So to put that in perspective, a Tesla Model 3 with 220 miles range would have costs, according to these numbers, $33,000 just for the battery in 2013. In 2020, that same battery would cost roughly $6,000. So this is a dramatic decrease in costs. And they're expected, electric vehicles are expected to reach price parity with more traditional internal combustion engine-based vehicles by 2025 to 2026. So that's coming very soon. But one of the big questions that everyone's asking, policy makers, utilities, system operators, is the grid ready? Is the grid prepared for the increase in demand, electricity demand that electric vehicles are going to bring? Okay. And so the short answer is it depends. And it depends how we manage this increase in demand. And so in the coming slides, I'll describe various scenarios that correspond to different approaches to managing this load. And I'll show how those different scenarios will result in different impacts, okay? And I'll come back to discuss the greenhouse gas emission impacts and potential that electric vehicles might bring to the grid. It's a little bit subtle and it depends again on how we will manage this load. So to help frame the discussion, I'll describe a pilot study that we recently completed with New York State electric and gas in upstate New York, exploring these various scenarios for residential electric charging. I should say this is joint work with my graduate student Paulina Alexenko. She's really, you know, has been the driver for everything we've done here. And so, you know, all the mistakes are mine and all of the outstanding results are ours. And using that pilot study, I'll discuss one, the impacts that unmanaged electric vehicle charging can have on the grid and how we might be able to harness the late influx of the electric vehicles in terms of how they charge to minimize this impact and turn on the grid. And various other opportunities that this flexibility might present to improve grid efficiency, resilience and sustainability. And then I'll close by discussing a few other opportunities of the natural risks that might accompany this transition. Okay, so let me just briefly describe the pilot that we carried out. This was a real world study and involved 35 electric vehicle owners in Tompkins County, New York. That's where Cornell University sits. Each of the participants was equipped with a level two charger, charging station in their homes.  Okay. So residential electric vehicle chargers, level two chargers will potentially dramatically increase peak loads because of this large potential to draw power. So in this pilot, we studied three scenarios, unmanaged electric vehicle charging. So what that essentially amounts to is allowing customers to begin charge, to charge their vehicles anytime they want. So when they plug in, they begin charging at the maximum rate until the vehicle is fully charged. We also examined different approaches to managing that charging. One approach is focused on using time of use prices, charging customers different prices at different hours of the day to incentivize them to maybe shift their load to certain hours of the day where prices are cheaper. And then a third approach that involves a more direct form of control where we actually take control of their chargers. And centrally optimize how the different electric vehicles draw power to minimize strain on the grid. And so I'll talk about these three scenarios. But before I do, I wanna just kind of describe this picture I have here to the right. So this black curve represents kind of nominal power demand for roughly 70 households in the region where we explored, where we were carrying our pilot out. So you see that roughly in the evening, 7 and 8 p.m. load peaks at around 120 kilowatts. And the figure above, what I've done is I've plotted data that reflects the distribution of times that people plug their electric vehicles in, that's this blue curve. And so what you see is that people tend to plug their cars in when they come home from work in between five and 7 p.m. And so the blue curve here is peaking during those hours. The red curve represents the distribution unplugged. So when people plug their vehicles from the chargers. And again, what you see is in the residential environment, people tend to leave in the morning when they leave for work. And so I'll talk about the implications of these distributions in a moment. But if we look at the arrival times when people plug in, you see that that aligns with the baseline peak demand. And so if people begin charging as soon as they plug in, we should expect to see an amplification of peak load. And so the data in fact reveals that. You see that, so each one of these slivers here represents the electricity demand of a different electric vehicle or pilot. And because people tend to arrive during peak hours of the day, you see that results in a dramatic increase in peak load. And the potential consequences of this increase in peak load is that it's potentially going to exhaust the distribution systems, the power systems capacity to serve that demand, whether that corresponds to kind of the transformers that you see in your local distribution network or maybe even the substations that interface that network with the high voltage transmission system. But returning back to this figure that kind of depicts the plug-in times and unplugged times, what you see is that when people begin charging in the evening, as soon as they plug in, they tend to finish or complete charging before their departure time the following morning. So what that reveals is that there's some underlying flexibility in those loads in the sense that they don't need to be charged immediately as soon as customers plug in because they have this kind of slack and their minimum charge time and their expected departure times. And so that immediately kind of leads one to think that, okay, well, can we provide incentives for customers to shift load from off peak to, sorry, from on peak to off peak hours? And many utilities have explored this possibility using what's known as time of use pricing. And what time of use pricing essentially amounts to is you have, during on peak hours, you charge a certain price, a high price. And during off peak hours, you charge another price, a lower price. And so in principle, customers who are flexible should shift their loads from on peak to off peak hours. So let's see what happens when you expose customers to these kinds of pricing sectors. So what ends up happening is you end up seeing a sharpening and actually an increase in peak load in certain scenarios. So the load under time of use pricing, if you compare the peaks is actually larger than load you would see under unmanaged charging. And the reason that happens is because of the synchronizing effects that time of use prices have on load. Everybody programs their charger to begin charging at the start of the off peak period. And what that does is that kind of synchronizes the times at which people start charging, thereby increasing the peak, even though this peak is happening in the middle of the night. And so to address this challenge, we asked ourselves, well, is there a different kind of mechanism that one might develop to leverage this flexibility in people's charge windows without inducing these unintended consequences of increased peaks? And the idea that we propose is very simple. So instead of providing customers time of use prices, what you do is you ask them for their deadlines when they need their vehicle charged by, the longer they're willing to delay, the less they pay for their electricity. In exchange, given a deadline, the utility or whoever's coordinating these loads can coordinate how all of the electric vehicles charge in a way to minimize their impacts on the grid while ensuring that everyone's vehicle is charged by its deadline. So everybody gets their energy when they need it by and those loads can be coordinated in a way to minimize their impacts on the grid. And so using this mechanism, we are able to realize the load here depicted in green. And again, each one of these slivers represents a different electric vehicle charging on the network. And so you've been able to completely eliminate the effects of electric vehicle load on peak load. Now, the way we actually executed this was through the use of two-way communication control and we were actually adjusting the power being drawn by every vehicle on a minute by minute timescale. And so that might kind of lead you to think, well, is there something more that one can do with this flexibility? I'd like to do is I'd like to talk about that as it relates to the decarbonization potential of transportation electrification. So I mean, one of the primary drivers behind the push to electrify our transportation sector is the promise that that will reduce the transportation sector's impact on US greenhouse gas emissions. So this is a really beautiful diagram that was developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. And what it shows here is a breakdown of how we produce energy in the United States on the left-hand side. And how we consume that energy. And so if you look at the transportation sector here, the majority of energy that's supplied to the transportation sector comes from petroleum, which obviously the burning of that fossil fuel results in greenhouse gas emissions. If we were to displace a large fraction of this energy source with electricity, the extent of the impact that we would see on greenhouse gas emission reductions would ultimately depend on the mix of electricity generation, the generators that are supplying that electricity to power those electric vehicles. And what you see today in the United States, a large fraction of that electricity comes from fossil fuels called natural gas. And so if we're going to truly realize the transportation sector that has zero emissions, we're going to have to increase the share of electricity coming from renewables like wind and solar. But that's challenging for a number of reasons. The primary reason being that wind and solar power intermittent, they're highly variable. Their power output can fluctuate on very rapid time scales. They're very difficult to forecast. And so that really complicates the challenge of balancing supply and demand when your source of energy or supply is uncontrollable. So because of this interminacy, there's a need to back these resources up, either with conventional generation like natural gas or energy storage. The latter is a very costly proposition. However, as we electrify our transportation fleet, we're essentially transitioning to a system that looks like a large bank of batteries or small energy storage devices. And there's an emergence of the possibility that you could coordinate these batteries on wheels through optimized charging to absorb this interminacy. And so what that would give rise to is really a symbiotic relationship between electric vehicles and renewables. Renewables, although clean, need to be balanced backed up by either storage or dispatchable generation. If you're using dispatchable generation like natural gas that mitigates the greenhouse gas benefit. Electric vehicles are clean if that electricity is being supplied by sustainable renewable energy resources like wind and solar. However, they're flexible. So that flexibility can be used to promote or support the integration of renewables. And so they really enable one another. And the ability to orchestrate the kind of expansion of these two resources simultaneously promises what I think is a very promising pathway to enable a reliable transition to a high penetration, high renewable penetration power system and a largely electric transportation system. And so I'll just kind of close by talking about some of the additional opportunities and risks we might face as we transition to a transportation and power sectors that look like this. So I mean, one of the main points is if you leave electric vehicles to their own devices, allow them to charge and unmanage whether this is going to stress them and potentially require very costly infrastructure of course. There is however, a tremendous amount of flexibility in electric vehicles. So you can use that flexibility to mitigate those impacts through smart charging or optimized charging, thereby increasing the utilization rate of your infrastructure. You can also use them to balance or help support the integration of renewables and renewables like wind and solar. And then even beyond that, these resources, electric vehicles, when aggregated, can be made to look like a giant battery and those batteries can provide other services to the grid, energy services or reliability services. If we think about the recent kind of winter freeze in Texas and the loss of power that many homes and people suffered, electric vehicles in some cases served as a source of backup power sometimes. And so the ability to discharge your batteries back into the grid would allow you essentially ride through blackouts for several days or indefinitely if you have solar on top of your home in addition to having an electric vehicle. And so at scale, the proliferation of electric vehicles has the potential to really increase the resilience of our power systems. But there are some risks that come with this, one of which has to do with, as we increase the way in which we measure and control resources at the edge of the grid using cellular communication networks with the internet, that's going to be accompanied by risk and increased risk of cyber attacks. And so it's crucial that we harden the cyber infrastructure that's used to manage these resources in a way that ensures that they're ultimately available when we need them and are not subject to these risks of being hijacked by malicious adversaries. So I'll close with that. And if you have questions that we're not able to address today, please feel free to reach out to me through email. Thank you. Thanks very much. That was great. I really appreciate your graphs and your chart. It's really sometimes hard to visualize sort of how big the peaks are and how you can flatten them. And it's really, really helpful to be able to see that in your slides. So thank you so much for your presentation today. And you brought up a bunch of things that we're gonna get into a little bit more, I predict, in our Q&A as well. So I encourage everyone to stick around for that. I wanted to just mention two quick things. One was, if you liked what you just heard, you should also go back and re-watch or watch for the first time the presentation from Juan Torres at our June 4th briefing. He is Associate Lab Director, Energy Systems Integration at NREL, National Renewable Energy Laboratory. And he talks about a lot of the same things, but from a more upstream perspective. And so I think that could be a great complimentary information resource for anyone who wants to dig into sort of what this looks like, sort of at an even bigger scale. And also while you're there, Jenny Chen and Daisy Robinson also had great presentations. I wouldn't want anyone to miss those as well. Also, if there are questions, and I see them coming in actually as we speak, there are two ways to ask them. One is you can send us an email. Email address to use is EESI at ESI.org. You can also follow us on Twitter at EESI online. Our third panelist is Janet Besser. She is Managing Director at the Smart Electric Power Alliance, where she oversees strategy for the SIPA Pathways Regulatory and Business Innovation Grid Integration and Electrification and Leads Content Development and Execution for Regulatory Innovation. She brings to this role broad energy industry experience as a regulator, clean energy business, association leader, utility executive developer, consultant and consumer advocate, and soon to be EESI presenter. So Janet, welcome to our panel today. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Thank you very much, Dan, had to quickly unmute myself there. And thank you very much to EESI for the invitation to participate today. And following these two great panelists, I know I learned a lot from listening to them and hope I can contribute as well. So good afternoon. As Dan said, I lead our work on regulatory and business innovation. And let me tell you at the next slide a little bit about the Smart Electric Power Alliance. We have a vision of a carbon-free energy system by 2050. And our mission is to facilitate the electric power industry's smart transition to a clean and modern energy future. And what that means is that we wanna make sure that electricity remains affordable, reliable, safe and resilient, as well as becomes increasingly carbon-free and clean. You go to the next slide. We are a membership organization. We have members that include utilities, what we call, including investor on utilities, cooperative utilities and municipal utilities, as well as utility agencies. We also have members that we call solution providers. And these are the developers of the new technologies that are increasingly being deployed from solar and wind developers to software developers to energy efficiency and demand response companies. One of the things that we do as a nonprofit is we do research, education, collaboration and standards. And one area of our research in expertise is supporting utilities, solution providers, customers, developers and other industry stakeholders on planning for and designing microgrids for resilience. And that is what I'm going to talk about today. So if you go to the next slide, a quick overview of what a microgrid is. So I have here the DOE definition. It's a group of interconnected loads and distributed energy resources within a clearly defined boundary that acts as a single controllable entity with respect to the grid. So what does that mean? What it means is that when you have a microgrid, you have the ability to generate power within that defined boundary. And then you can take the boundary and island it from the rest of the system when there is an instance of an outage. And this can happen automatically, it can be controlled. But the important thing is that microgrids are being looked at increasingly by communities, customers and utility systems as a way to manage resilience on the grid in the face of increasing storms and other natural disasters. So if you go to the next slide, the key thing when you're figuring out whether a microgrid is an opportunity for a particular set of customers or a community is identifying the value that it's going to provide to three key groups. Monica talked about the important constituencies of grid interactive efficient buildings, providing benefits for customers and communities in the utility system. And it's very similar for microgrids. So the key difference between this and other distributed energy resources is with the ability to island, they can provide backup power during an outage or an event. And this is the key source of their value to customers, local governments and the utility. The resilience triangle that you see here is taken from our microgrid playbook, which is about community resilience for natural disasters. And I've got a link to that at the end of the presentation. And what you can see here is it's the intersection of value that really makes microgrids work. So customers want to avoid power outages, they may want to have control over their power quality, depending on what they're using electricity for. Communities want to make sure that their critical services aren't interrupted in the case of a storm. And we saw this as a big issue in the Northeast where I reside during the Superstorm Sandy. You want to be able to keep your fire, police, hospitals up and running in the face of an outage, particularly when the storm resulted in outages for some customers of up to a couple of weeks. And the third constituency here are the utilities who want to maintain safe and affordable and efficient operations and leverage grid assets for distribution grid services. I'm not talking so much about it today, but microgrids can be used to provide other grid services that provide value to customers and communities and utilities, as well as critical value during outages. If you go to the next slide, what is needed to make microgrids work? It really is a confluence of the value streams to each of these three constituencies to make them economic. And there's some continuing gaps, things that we're still working on figuring out that relate to standards in common terminology, whether they're proprietary systems that can't talk to each other. What is a utility business model that makes sense for deploying a microgrid? What are some of the compensation mechanisms for either the microgrid provider or the developer or the customers? The regulatory frameworks under which all of this operates and then access to clean and resilient power. Fortunately, there are some potential solutions. And one of the things that we continue to work on at SIPA is advancing these solutions. So the lack of standards in common terminology is problematic, but organizations like the National NIST, and I'm never gonna get this acronym right, the National Institute for Standards and something or other, but basically a standards organization runs through the Department of Commerce, provides resources to advance standards and interoperability of frameworks. If you think about it, you've got the grid that has its own requirements, the microgrid has requirements, and the customer may have requirements, and they all need to be able to talk to each other and to work. The key area for additional work is establishing a clear and consistent regulatory framework. And there are really two factors here. One is a regulatory framework that outlines what are the roles of the utility, the microgrid developer and the customer. And so in some cases, microgrid providers can't use distribution wires that are owned by the utility. So you can clearly see that you need a lot of cooperation among these players, but in fact, you also need some consistency of understanding either in the state you're in, the community you're in, or more broadly with respect to reliability standards, who's in charge of what and who's responsible for what in order to make this work. The other element that's really important for the utility in particular is clear and consistent guidance on how they can recover the costs that they need to incur to actually integrate and make use of microgrids. You have customers that have actually deployed microgrids for years, hospitals generally have backup generation that can run their key and essential services that is a form of a microgrid, a single user microgrid. You have some microgrids that have been around that serve not only the customer on whose facility the generation may be located, but maybe a couple of other customers around. But in order to really capture value from this, the utility needs to make some investments in communications, controls, management, visibility in order to capture value for itself and all the other customers on the grid, as well as to facilitate the deployment of microgrids by key customers that need these essential services. There are a number of federal programs that have been really helpful. One is a DOE funded pilot and demonstration projects that are geared towards exploring some of what we call regulatory sandboxes to understand what works and what doesn't. One example is the Bronzeville Community Microgrid that Commonwealth Edison and Project Partners deployed. They received about $25 million in DOE grants that covered everything from technical to business model evaluations. And based on their ability to leverage this funding, ComEd was able to make the case to regulators for an innovative ownership model where ComEd is owning the storage in the microgrid controller assets and then putting out RFPs to DER developers for the distributed generation assets. And this makes it work for everybody. So one of the key things to think about is the fact that microgrids are all about partnerships and working together. Another successful federal program that's been really helpful is our funds to state energy offices for renewables and energy efficiency, allowing the energy offices to fund stakeholder engagement and start and consider plans for microgrids that are focused on risk mitigation. SIPA has assisted a number of state energy offices in assessing opportunities for microgrids under this program. If we go to the next slide, you can see some of the resources that SIPA has available related to deployment and development of microgrids for community resilience and decarbonization. And actually, let me speak for a minute about decarbonization. As I said, microgrids have been around a long time. In the past, they have been, diesel backup generation has fueled them, maybe natural gas or oil. Increasingly, the focus is on renewable and clean microgrids that provide support when the grid may go down or serve needs of customers that they have even in general, and sometimes to decarbonize for greater power quality to have that assurance for resilience. So you think also not only about hospitals, police fire, but military installations are another place where microgrids have been deployed. So you have now multiple objectives of states as they look at the opportunities for microgrids for resilience. And here you have links to some of the reports that I mentioned that can help state and local governments, customers and utilities plan for microgrids that can achieve resilience and decarbonization on the grid. If you go to the last slide, you'll see our contact information. And due to the rescheduling, I'm really standing in for Jared Leader, who is our senior manager of industry strategy and focuses his work on microgrids. And so you can see his email address here and we'd welcome any questions that you have about their work we're doing to help states and local communities deploy microgrids for resilience. Thank you. Thank you, Janet. And thanks also to Jared, who helped us in the lead up to the briefing and really appreciate, Janet, your willingness to join us today. We understand that the scheduling issue from last week, when we made it for the right reason, but we understand that sometimes that causes some issues. So we really, really appreciate your willingness to jump in and pick up. And thanks once again to Jared. Excellent presentation. And again, if anyone wants to go back and look at Janet's slides, everything will be available online at www.mesi.org. Our fourth and final panelist is Dana Cabell. She is a professional engineer who has enjoyed an impressive tenure with Southern California Edison in the areas of transmission and distribution long-term planning. Presently, she is director of the SCE integrated system strategy, ISS group. Dana and her team are responsible for ensuring SCE's transmission and distribution system is safe, resilient, reliable, clean and affordable through well-informed strategic decisions regarding grid investments, integration of renewable and energy storage resources enabling grid modernization resiliency efforts and reaching a carbon neutral electric grid as well as many other things. Dana, welcome to the presentation or welcome to the panel today. I will turn it over to you. Great. Excuse me. Thank you, Dan. And I wanna thank EESI also for the invitation to be part of this very important discussion. So let's move to the next slide. So where I wanna start is back in 1980, it's pathway 2045 road. And really what this roadmap was outlining was how are we gonna or what we need to do to enable a clean energy future in California? This in-depth analysis really concluded that there's three profound changes across the state's economy that are required to achieve 100% carbon neutrality by 2045. The first is to deconize the electric sector. As you were listening to some of the other panelists, as we electrify our load as we're getting more transportation electrification, building electrification, what we were seeing within our analysis is that across the 24-hour period or 8760 hours, we're gonna see 60% increase in that energy demand. And on a peak load basis, about a 40% increase. So really to meet this demand from a resource perspective, both the transmission and distribution grid will need to be able to integrate gigawatts of renewable energy and also gigawatts of energy storage. So as we were studying this and trying to integrate the large amounts of renewable generation and energy storage, we're seeing that the costs are gonna be approximately 170 billion dollars for these clean energy sources and 75 billion in grid investments by 2045. The second is to decarbonize the other sectors of the economy as we were talking here, electrifying transportation and buildings. The pathway white paper estimates a 20 million light duty, 800,000 medium duty and 100,000 heavy duty, electric vehicles will need to be added, resulting in electrification of 75% of vehicles within California. Building electrification such as space and water heating and homes and businesses will need to grow more than 70%. So beyond the TE and BE, the hard to electrify industrial applications will need to switch over to more low carbon fuels like hydrogen and renewable natural gases, including to fuel synchronous generation sources for grid reliability if you have a major system disturbance. The third is to capture any remaining carbon through natural processes and engineering solutions so that with all of this, we can really achieve this 100% clean energy future. Now as pathway 25, really light out what needs to change to achieve this clean energy future. So what about the how? So if you can go to the next slide, I'd like to talk to a paper that Edison published in December of 2020. And it's a white paper that is laying out how we achieve this future. And we've kind of dubbed this as reimagining the grid. And reimagining the grid or RTG for short really seeks to address, like I was saying, the how the grid must change to support California's greenhouse gas reduction goals as laid out in the past. At high level, our systematic approach really begins with understanding the grid challenges. What are customers will need from the grid? How the supply and mix will need to evolve and how the regional climate change affects that the grid will need to endure and to ride through. In our starting point, we evaluated the impact these change drivers will have on the current grid, existing technologies and the physical topology of the grid. In the development of the grid options, we looked at the unique needs and characteristics of the different SE regions or portions of our grid and really identified and focused on local grid challenges. We prioritize the specific grid objectives and required capabilities most relevant for each of these regions and determine which technologies and solutions, existing ones and new technologies would be best to address the objectives. And in doing so, we can develop specific grid architectures or designs and specific technologies that are needed to deploy on this regional customer level. So really the reimagining the grid really comes down to thinking more customer centric and understanding what the need for those customers and the regions within which they live and really to think differently about how we design and operate the grid. So we laid out a future roadmap showing what grid components will be required when those will be needed and how we'll get. Now, as again, as we're trying to work through and think through achieving the Pathway 2045 goals and withstanding how it's gonna withstand all these climate change impacts, really creates a host of challenges from the electric grid perspective. And these expect challenges are driven by customer supply and climate. Our customers, our service area is gonna be going under changes of urbanization, the demographics and other local factors affecting the economy. So too, will our customers electricity usage change? And as the other panelists have already talked about, the usage of the electricity for our customers, we're gonna be needing to adopt new technologies and enable the control of how and when the customers consume, store, produce energy. And as such, the future grid must be able to accommodate and address the following challenges. How supporting large adoption of DERs on our distribution system. Higher electricity usage and low density largely due to buildings, transportation electrification resulting in changes to daily load profiles in the time of the peak demand. As we were seeing, our peak demand is shifting. Power quality is gonna be very important too. The more we put in power electronics that then users place in their homes or in their businesses to power quality becomes a really key issue. And because of all the robotics or the inverters that we were putting in, all the different data centers. So we really need to pay attention to ensuring that the quality of the electricity coming to these customers is of highest quality and doesn't cause issues with their equipment. And really the customer's reliance on electricity is gonna continue to increase and evolve and it's gonna be really critical for their daily activities. The other challenges to apply in a day's resource mix is quickly transitioning from, especially in California from traditional fossil fuel generation to variable inverter based renewables like solar and wind, along with energy storage assets. In some cases, this transition already has and will continue to present some challenges here. Integrating high levels of renewables and delivering their variable output to load centers when needed. Ensuring resource adequacy. Make sure we have enough power on the grid to serve both the system and local with an evolving mix of these resources and maintaining grid stability and resiliency. As conventional synchronous generation, the rotating mass is retired and replaced with renewables and inverter based resources. We need to really know how we can continue providing what we call for the grid for the grid stability inertia. Making sure that it can ride through major disturbances and you don't end up with system wide blackouts. And of course climate. Increasing climate risks such as extreme temperatures, wildfires, sea level rise, floods, really they directly impact the grid resulting in diminished performance, reliability, lifespan of grid assets. Perhaps we're gonna have to start derating equipment, have different standards. It impacts our customers too with a higher heat. And of course the supply less predictive hydropower because of droughts and of course with extreme heats and fire. So as you go to the next slide, historically the grid has always been designed to provide safe, reliable and affordable and resilient power to our customers. So today's grid, it has been modernized to meet additional needs including increased reliability, resiliency, accommodates the DERs that are coming on the system with distinct transmission and distribution architects, architectures. Moving forward, grid planning, design and operations will need to continue to modernize and shift from a singular focus on system wide standards to one that really meets multiple objectives based on specific and localized needs. Some of these key changes include strengthening our forward radar. Namely our ability to increase visibility and track upcoming customer supply and climate trends. Get new technologies and power system issues to reduce future uncertainty. Really to be proactive in all these changes. Now moving from a deterministic planning approach typically focused on a single worst case condition to more of a risk-based multi-scenario and adaptive approach. Greater integration of generation, transmission distribution, customer resources really to optimize our planning and our operating decisions. Recognizing the heterogeneity of different regional needs moving from a uniform grid architecture to region-based modular designs, really customer and regional focus. And really incorporating all of these flexibilities into future grid architectures and technologies that can rapidly reconfigure and isolate portions of the grid while utilizing storage and DERs and controllable loads. Now the reimagining of the grid will be an adaptive evolution over time to achieve the objectives of Pathway 2045 while increasing and addressing the increasing climate impacts. It's gonna consist of these heterogeneous architectures, each integrating throughout T and D levels. More autonomous grid design making, especially at the grid edge and responsive dynamic changing conditions. And the use of one common bundled information operational technology platform as an enabler for the different capabilities and technologies with advanced cyber protection. And really these different architectures will be tailored to specific needs and locations using fit for the purpose of existing next gen technology. So I'm gonna stop there because it's a lot of information. I know we wanna get to some of the questions and so I want to, there was one last slide, but I'll just, you'll have all these slides, I think will be posted on the website plus there are links to these two white papers that you can obtain the white papers and all the appendices associated with the white papers. So I'm gonna stop there and turn it back over to Dan. Awesome, thank you for that. And yes, you're exactly right. Everything will be posted online. And in the next week or two, we'll also have written summaries of all of the presentations. So everyone who wants to go back and watch the archive webcast, they're welcome to do it, but they can also scan summary notes quickly to find and pinpoint the information they're looking for. We will spend the next 20 minutes or so in discussion. So if our panelists can turn their cameras on, we'll start, I have a couple of questions and I think we have way too many questions from the audience that we can really address. So I'm gonna do my best to incorporate them into the discussion. There's a couple of points I wanna dig into a little bit and Monica, we'll start with you and then we'll kind of walk back through the order of presenters since it's been a while since we've heard from you. Each of you and your presentations painted a picture, a pretty cool picture actually of how our homes and buildings will be interacting with the grid in new ways and innovation, interconnectedness, integration. These are words that will soon define how we interact with our power system in new ways. But we're not quite there yet. And so I would love to hear your thoughts about what are the key barriers or challenges? Are they technological? Are they policy? Or are they human? Are they behavioral challenges that we need to address in order to really rapidly get to where we need to be with respect to the grid edge? So Monica, we'll start with you and then we'll go through the panel. Sharon, yeah, that's a great question. And having, you know, for our roadmap, we interviewed over 100 people and it's been quite a bit of time over the last few years sort of asking this question from the building perspective and sort of, you know, from grid interactive efficient buildings perspective. And technology is really important, but I think we can work on that, right? With continuing investment, we can develop the technologies that are needed. In fact, many of them already exist. From my perspective, it's really more on the regulatory side. As I mentioned in the presentation today, there really aren't very many incentives for people to contribute with demand flexibility. And so I think if we really want to develop markets and new business models, we need to increase the incentive options that are available today. And then the other thing I would just plug is really also, I mentioned this also, but the workforce angle, I think it's really critical that we put continued, and frankly, new focus on this. I think there's a lot of gaps in the workforce today. And if we really wanna get up to scale and implementation, we're gonna need to have more people comfortable with the technologies that we discussed today. Thanks. Elyon, we'll go to you next. Yeah, no, so I think there are three challenges. I agree with Monica the technological aspects of kind of integrating the ERs and transitioning to the systems that everybody's described today. Those are smaller and I think we can overcome those. In my mind, the three primary challenges are regulatory, behavioral, and security, cybersecurity specific. Now, from a regulatory perspective, I think we're gonna have to change utility business model. At some level, we're gonna have to unbundle the distribution system, like we've unbundled the transmission system because in order to allow these kinds of resources to proliferate in a competitive fashion, you need to give them equal access to the distribution board. And so that will kind of ultimately give rise to the need to change how we regulate utilities. In addition to that, I think we need to think very carefully about equity. So as we kind of change how we regulate utilities and the proliferation of these kinds of resources, we need to think about whether these transformations adversely impact certain segments of society. This has happened to some extent with solar and kind of the net energy metering policies that utilities have used for those of you who are familiar with that, ultimately kind of adversely impacting people without the ability to afford some with increasing kind of fixed delivery costs that they've had that they've been transferred from those with solar to those without solar. Behavioral, I mean, ultimately the ability to control DPRs owned by individual customers requires you to engage with those individuals, whether it's through new markets or incentives. And when you engage with those individuals, you need to ensure that the response you extract from them or their resources is reliable enough that you can actually use it to displace conventional generation or infrastructure. For instance, if I say, look, I'm going to rely on electric vehicles being flexible to shift load in order to avoid having to build out my infrastructure, I need to ensure that that's going to be available on a daily basis for 20 years with some level of reliability, assurance that I'm not going to exceed my network's capacity. Then finally, security. I think it's absolutely crucial. Those challenges really need to be treated as a forethought and not an afterthought. It's important to expand the degree of control we're exerting on these resources at the edge of the power system because malicious actors, whether it's through the internet or other forms of wireless communication, having the ability to take control of hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles and how they charge could result in catastrophic consequences for the power grid. So sorry, that was a long answer, but thanks a lot. Well, it's fine because it was also a good answer. So that helps a lot. Janet, let's go to you next. Well, it's heartening to me as I lead SEPA's regulatory and business innovation work to hear that Elian and Monica agree that regulatory is a barrier, is the key barrier. A great faith in technology as a non-engineer that the engineers will figure that out, but one of the things that we're seeing not only is a lack of sufficient incentives, particularly around things like grid efficient buildings for customers to be adopting new technologies, but the regulatory framework doesn't provide incentives or support for utilities to be deploying new technologies and making the investments in grid modernization that they need to be making in order to have these new technologies that customers are adopting, increasing numbers actually benefit not only those customers, but all customers, which gets to Elian's equity point of view. So some of the regulatory barriers really are down in the weeds of regulation that utilities generally earn a return on a capital investment, but that say buying services from a micro grid that is owned by a customer or a developer or some combination of the two ends up being just a pass through of those costs for them. And so they're less interested in pursuing something that's a pass through than something they can earn on. This doesn't mean that utilities are the bad guys at the table, but like any other business, they need to be given incentives and have the opportunity to earn so that when they're deploying things that are going to provide greater benefits to customers. The other big issue I think is behavioral and what I will put in that category is educating and engaging customers. We need a better understandings of how customers interact with electricity, how they use electricity. Time of use rates is a great example. Some customers will completely ignore the price signals, others will react to them, others will react by saying, I'm certain going to be bad for me and therefore I don't like it without really understanding what it is. There've been some research articles out of Texas about utilities doing some load management in terms of controlling air conditioning thermostat sets that have gotten the reaction, oh, this is the terrible thing that the utility is interfering in my household or in my business, but in fact, actually it's quite a good thing because if it's done right, it's transparent to the customer but provides the utility with a great tool. So I would say education and regulation on regulatory policy are key barriers. And Dana? Yeah, no, agree with everything that's already been said, but I wanna focus in on it, completely agree about the regulatory and the policy, trying to really enable affordability and equity, shift to more of a grid edge type of environment. It's gonna be very important. When I think about the kind of the human behavior and human side from a utility perspective, we really need to look how we're going to become partners with our customers, really having that partnership with them to ensure that they are willing partners to join in on all of this. We need to, like Janet was saying, we need to educate them why this is important and what this all means when we have these different devices and communications coming into their homes. So it's through the communication or the education and continued communication with these customers to help them understand what this partnership looks like and how they can help the power grid but how it helps them also. And especially having this joint, hopefully this joint vision and goal of a clean power grid. So to me, it's gaining that partnership and that trust with our customers, I think is gonna be very vital for us to do all that we've been talking about here. Thanks. I wanna follow up something that many of you mentioned, actually I think all of you mentioned, is the idea of incentives to get whether it's a utility or a customer to either do something or make an investment in something or change behavior or something. Dana, maybe we'll start with you and we'll go in reverse order and try to do this as more of a lightning round. What are the types of, and this is a question from the audience I should say, what are the types of incentives that we need and what are the information gaps that if we only knew more about maybe customer behavior or maybe how certain people would respond to something like time of use rates, what are those main information gaps that are preventing incentives from being deployed effectively? That's a good question. The incentives, I mean, from a customer's perspective, they're one and make sure what they're doing is gonna kind of help their bottom line too, right? So providing those initial incentives through the different type of programs, whether it's the rooftop solar type programs who NEM really trying to build out the technologies because as all that new technology builds out, the costs go down. So those initial financial incentives, I think are important, but we do need to continue to look at that and once it comes to a certain point, maybe you don't need those financial incentives anymore, but I think continued understanding how these customers behave and I think some of the gap is that communication and education with the customers. What does this all mean? Especially when we're trying to shift to TOU rates right now. So really trying to help them understand what does that mean for them? And how just shifts in their behavior can actually save them within their electric bill because especially as they're trying to electrify more and more in their home. So I think a lot of the continued communication and providing these programs to them is gonna be important to build out what we've been talking about here and having more of the customer side technology that's gonna get us to where we need to get to. Janet, I'm happy to go to you if you have thoughts on incentives and what some of these information gaps might be. Yeah, so I think they really do center on understanding customers and what they want and then making sure they have tools to respond to the incentives. So if you think about things like time abuse rates if they don't know until after the fact, it's hard for them to respond. And one of the things that we've seen in our utility transformation challenge that leading utilities to put in place is really engaging with stakeholders, engaging with customers to understand what they want so that you get right from them what is needed in terms of incentives. Elyon, from your perspective, what are the kinds of incentives that could get people to charge their electric vehicles at the right time? Yeah, I mean, so I think most importantly that incentives have to be structured in a way that it's easy for customers to understand because through some of our studies, we found that there are non-trivial transaction costs that customers incur and engaging with their smart meters or electric vehicle on a daily basis. We found that many people use to set it and forget it kind of approach to engaging with our program. And so that needs to be taken into account. Also different customers are motivated in different ways. I mean, oftentimes you'll find that the marginal value to be of behavior change to an individual customer in dollars and cents is relatively small on a weekly or monthly basis. And so that may not be a strong enough incentive to motivate the kind of behavior and behavior change you would need at scale to actually have an impact. But some customers are motivated by other things like environmental considerations. So understanding how to construct a diverse array of incentives that target different segments of your customer population is, I think, crucial. And then I think one of the challenges that we've encountered in our work is typically the kinds of people that you engage in as pilots are first adopters and are not representative of the broader population. So understanding how to extrapolate from what you learn from these smaller studies to a broader population, I think, is a challenge. Monica, we'll give you the last word on this. Sure, I would just second the need for customer segmentation. And I know we have found talking with different and looking at different pilots that customers do respond to different incentives. And in fact, we have a funding opportunity announced right now for pilots and connected communities, which is looking just at, one of the key questions we're trying to answer is better understanding how much customers are willing to sort of what limits they have, where an incentive will push. And then at a certain point where just, you know, people's incentive won't be enough to change the behavior. So I think this is a really ripe area for further research. We have a few minutes left. And I'm gonna try to structure this last one as maybe also a bit of a lightning round, because I think it's really important and it incorporates some of the feedback we're getting from the audience. So our audience is primarily a policymaker audience. That's who we're timing in. And any aiming in and anyone who's watched our session today has just learned a ton about grid edge and building to grid integration, electric vehicle to grid integration. But we're only one source of information. And so they may be hearing about this stuff from other sources that are saying, well, you know, this can't really work in practice. The, you know, these systems aren't gonna be as resilient, not gonna be as reliable. And I'm wondering if you have, Monica, maybe we'll start with you and we'll go through the order. If you, what would you say to someone who questions whether grid edge advancements could truly make our energy supply more resilient and more reliable, maybe based on what people have seen in parts of the country like Texas, where they've seen some pretty unfortunate power interruptions. And also how would you, what would you say to them if they were concerned that we might be inadvertently creating haves and have nots? So some customers are experiencing more resilient and reliable power. Others are being left behind. What would you say to, what would you respond to with that? Sure, I would say, you know, from the energy efficiency perspective, we've been doing this for decades, I think, and for demand response, we have frankly too, but we are looking at changing the paradigm and having, you know, just more dynamic approach. And we have heard just what you said. And that is actually why we are, we put a significant fund, you know, up to 65 million towards this funding opportunity announcement that I just discussed. Because we want to document some of the issues that you said, because we, you know, we've seen in pockets and small pilots that actually many of sort of the pushback are, like you're saying, sort of doubts on the performance that those don't hold true, but we wanna sort of document that at larger scale from a national perspective in different regions that actually these, you know, demand side solutions will show up when needed. So that's sort of been our take from Department of Energy was trying to sort of build out and demonstrate the viability of those solutions. Great, that's really helpful. Elyon, what would you say to someone who says, yeah, your study is great, but it only applies to upstate New York. How are we gonna ensure reliability and resilience on a larger scale in places that are already having difficulties? I mean, I think ultimately, you know, one possible path forward to ensure kind of resilience and equity in terms of access to that resilience is to share these resources, whether that's through kind of, you know, innovative financing mechanisms where multiple households contribute to the funding and construction of maybe shared storage or shared solar devices, so that if there is a ultimately a blackout or an outage, the value of those resources would bring could be kind of shared across a much broader population and more efficient way. And you know, I mean, if we think forward, you know, to maybe utility 2.0 with what the future utility might look like, we may have new markets emerge at the distribution level where different customers can sell their flexibility or resilience to other customers that might value it more or less. So I think there are multiple ways of kind of ensuring equity in terms of access to the efficiency that these resources would bring. Thanks, Janet? Yeah, I think sharing is a really important point, but I think the other key factor is to integrate these resources. What I would say is customers are already adopting these new technologies and increasing amounts and they'll continue to do that. And unless we have the policy support and the regulatory framework that then enables utilities to integrate and take advantage of them, there will be have and have nots. We're setting up have and have not situations if we don't act. And so I think the key here is to put that policy framework in place that enables utilities to integrate these resources and use them as well as the individual customers who are deploying them using them. And that's how we will benefit all customers and decarbonize the grid. Dana, once again, you get the last word. Yeah, I think just as we were laying out in the reimagining the grid white paper, it's really focusing on the needs for the different areas within the power grid and understanding what those specific needs are. And especially if there are areas that are more disadvantaged type of communities, what can we do specifically within those communities to provide them the same advantages of putting in behind the meter type resources for resiliency or trying to create maybe community type of resiliency microgrids, if you will. So really understanding that looking at the grid and coming up with different architectures, different designs so that you are enabling all customers to have take advantage of these grid edge technologies and the behind the meter type of resources so that they can be resilient in blackouts or like with us for wildfires and that type of thing, so. Great, thank you so much. And that brings us to the end, maybe a minute or two over, sorry about that, but thanks very much to our four fabulous panelists, Monica, Eleon, Janet and Dana. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you also for your flexibility and scheduling and understanding as we move the briefing to today and also one last shout out to our friend Jared for also helping us. Four excellent presentations. I encourage everyone in our audience to go back and look at all of the slides and look at all of the notes. It's a really cool topic. In some ways, there's no way to do it justice in 90 minutes. So hopefully, maybe perhaps we'll come back and explore the topic in more detail in another session. We will actually be going on a bit of a briefing hiatus here at EESI. We have lots of really cool stuff in the works, but we don't have a briefing for a little while. Keep an eye out next week for a save the date for our congressional clean energy expo, which will be towards the end of July. And then we will like most of the rest of the country be taking a little bit of vacation time and getting back to sort of what people do in August in Washington, which is leave Washington and go find other fun stuff to do. We'll also be taking advantage of that a little bit of time off, but never fear. We will be back from Labor Day and we have tons of good stuff in the works, really interesting briefing topics to really important updates to some of our most popular fact sheets and issue briefs. So we will not be taking the time off. We just won't be doing much congressional education while our friends on Capitol Hill are out of town for extended periods. So again, best way to keep up with everything is to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions, and that way you never miss a thing in case you're also on vacation, which hopefully will be taking some time away. We'd like to thank everyone in our audience for joining us today. If you have a moment or two, we would really appreciate your feedback. We read every response. We got one response at our last briefing about some me not wearing a tie that may not change before we go back in person, but it made me laugh when I saw who it was from and definitely read all of the survey responses. So thank you for that. If you had any tech issues, if you have ideas, if you have anything that you would like to share with us about today's session, please take advantage of the opportunity. We really do appreciate everybody's time when you fill out the survey. I'd also like to thank everyone behind the scenes at EESI for all of their help pulling off today and also rescheduling and finding a time and coordinating with our great panelists. I'd like to thank Daniel Bryan, Sydney O'Shaughnessy, Amber Todorov, Anna McGinn, Savannah Bertrand, Omri Laport, and we have a really awesome group of summer interns, Anna, Ashlyn, Irina, and Jackson. Thank you all for all of your help today as well. We will go ahead and end it there. If you missed anything, just one last reminder. You can see everything, archived webcasts, briefing notes, all of that by visiting us online, www.esi.org. And we will end. Sorry for going a couple of minutes over. I hope everyone has a great rest of your Friday and happy weekend.


Two great events today here at the COP23 in Bonn. The first event was looking at how you can track and measure local action towards 100% renewable energies. One of the really interesting things that emerged is the differences in access to data between cities in the global north and cities in the global south. Cities in the global north are drowning in data, an excess of information. And of course, cities in the global south might not even know how many people live in their municipal boundaries. So we had a really productive discussion about the ways that these cities can collect data and help to inform their investments in energy access and clean energy. The second event, hosted by our long-standing friend and partner, Miserior, was focusing on the ways that climate finance can be used to help promote cities without evictions. This is an increasing challenge as so many cities are inundated by climate-related hazards. Is it acceptable to help people relocate away from risks like sea-level rise or flood? Or do we need to use climate finance to incentivize them to live in safer parts of the city with tenure, decent housing, basic services and infrastructure? The main thing that we've taken away from this is the importance of working in partnership, local authorities and community organizations working together to respond to climate risks. And that's all for today, but I bet you're looking forward to Celine's video.