Good afternoon. Thank you folks for joining us. Think Tech Hawaii. Time for responsible change and we're going to talk about guns and hate crimes and the connection between them and maybe some connections that don't get talked about very often. So we have with us resident expert Bill Harrison, leading criminal defense attorney and civil rights, Sandra Sims, retired judge, Tina Patterson, urban planner, mediator, arbitrator, Jack of many trades, and Louise Ng, leading civil lawyer and women's rights lawyer and women's foundation, representative and leader for many years. And then whoever this other guy is, the moderator who will just try and stay out of the way of the people that we should be listening to. So, Bill, given your background and expertise, the connection between guns and hate crimes and what do we need to think about that we haven't to help us understand better how to deal with this stuff because we're not. Yeah, you know, and one of the interesting things that I thought about when you hear about these terrible atrocities is you're going to get people who are going to control proponents and you get the people like the NRA who want the Second Amendment to mean that we all can bear arms. But, you know, the interesting thing about it is the NRA, it depends on which way the wind's blowing. The NRA will take a position one way or the other. Back in the 60s, the 67 and 68, when Huey Newton and Bobby Seale took the California open gun laws and watched around and police patrols to make sure that black folk weren't being killed by police officers, the NRA jumped to the gun and said, hey, we got to control this. Absolutely. Yeah, when we have black people with guns walking around, we don't want that. So, the NRA actually was instrumental in passing the Gun Control Act in 1968. But today, they're basically saying we need to be able to possess and bear arms. And so, they take the position based on what they feel at the time.  And that was too much for the NRA. So, you know, it's an interesting issue that we deal with. It's a love-hate issue with Americans because of Second Amendment. And so, going back to the original question was, you know, what do we do about this? Obviously, we're not going to get rid of guns. Obviously, guns are going to be in bad people's hands. There's no way you're going to get around that, okay? I think as a nation, we have the most, you know, weapons in private ownership in any other nation in the world. So, it's out there. We're not going to get around it. So, I think we have to regulate, if you want to, to make sure that people who have bad intentions don't get those firearms in their hands. But to outlaw them totally, I think is, to me, is a mistake if you think about the ramifications of that. So, what if we shifted the presumption the other way? Instead of presuming everybody has the right to bear arms, as if everybody was part of a well-armed militia, which is what the Constitution connects guns with. But what if instead of that, you said, if you want to have a gun, you have to come in and demonstrate a specific purpose and use for that gun. And if it is limited to a particular area time or activities, such as duck hunting or deer hunting season, you get what's appropriate for that, for that purpose during that period in those locations. And that's all. And if you show up with it somewhere else, you are not in compliance. Well, I think outlaws are actually that way already. When you apply for firearms, you have to take a test. You have to be able to use that weapon. And that's what the course has to approve you to get that weapon. And then you need an AK-47 to bring down a duck or a deer. That goes back to somebody who says that you have a right to bear. I don't think we have, I think in Hawaii, I don't think we have the right to carry assault weapons. There's certainly the right to have, you can get the license and take the test and get the guns as you may need. And that's fine. The notion of regulation when we start talking about guns, it's difficult for me to comprehend why it is so incomprehensible to people when there's so many other things that we regulate without any dire consequences.   And then now they are. And we don't think about that stuff anymore.  So we have this perspective about crime and criminals and stuff that kind of is in our nature. But I mean, not the nature of being a criminal, but you know, it's embedded in our history. But when you go back to the establishment of the Brewer and Alcohol and Tobacco and Farms, agency was established following, you know, the times of Capone and the Mafia and the gangsters and all of that. And much of what they were doing had to do with, aside from the guns, but was the you know, alcohol, which began regulating, began being regulated after that. And so we get, you know, so there is this place now where we understand that that's that's what takes place. And it's, and it's okay. And people can operate and function with that. They don't feel the need to like, I want to go because there's no Constitution amendment that says it. And I don't even think the Second Amendment actually just says you have the right to, you know, complete and total. There's no right, there's no, what I'm saying is that the amendment does not prohibit the regulation of firearms, which states are permitted to do. And that's exactly it. I know in that first, the first big case that kind of came out that talked about handguns, I think it was the McDonald case, was it? And of course, that came from Illinois as well. When Chicago attempted to ban handguns, not the assault weapons, but handguns because of the, you know, the gang violence. And it was a city ordinance that banned, and that was deemed to be, I think it was one of the first rulings that addressed the Second Amendment in a very long time. That was in, when was that 2000 something? Anyway, it was the one that actually said that the regulation had gone too far. It was a city doing it, and that the amendment, as the Supreme Court saw it, the second amendment did not permit them to single out, and certainly the city, to single out and ban, you know, handguns in that way. So that kind of spurred a lot more discussions and arguments about the ability of of municipalities, and in states as well, to regulate in how far they could go. So that was part of that discussion as well. So I mean, yeah, that is a timely discussion because the Ninth Circuit just issued an opinion. Yes. That in Hawaii, the county can regulate both open carry and concealed weapons. And so there are a number of states who, and other areas in which there's a different opinion and different appellate opinions. So the Supreme Court is going to have to actually as to what does a Second Amendment really say. And it's going to be interesting what they determine since that court is a fairly conservative court now. William, I want to pull the thread on what you started talking about earlier, and that is when we talk about guns, and you indicated, and it's true, I reside on the East Coast in Maryland. And the use of firearms is regulated on a state by state basis. I am in an area where I'm bordered by Virginia and the District of Columbia. We are required to take training, as you mentioned earlier. If you want to be a firearm owner, and I'm specifically talking about handgun, you have to undergo training, if you do want to possess a firearm, you have to be fingerprinted. Your records are sent to the state police. They conduct an investigation, which takes approximately 30 days. So you actually acquiring that firearm is going to take at a minimum 30 days. But it's also important as a firearm owner to know what are the regulations. So I'm a firearm owner. And we can talk about the journey. It was not an easy one. And I can explain why I did it. But knowing what I had to understand was, I cannot have my firearm in my vehicle with the bullets in the firearm. They need to be, the firearm can be in one place, and the bullets separate. Meaning that the firearm can be in the car, the bullets better be in the trunk. If I'm pulled over for any reason, I'm basically in violation of the law. The District of Columbia, however, has a different law. And I can cross over into the district, and it's very different. Same for Virginia. What I, where I see, and I'm a proponent of the regulation, I'm a proponent of saying, if you have a firearm, why do you need an assault rifle? As you said earlier, if you're going duck hunting, do you need an AK 47? Or could your shotgun do what it needs to do? You also talked about concealed carry and open Maryland as an individual. You're 99% of the time you're not going to get a license with concealed carry, unless you know that you are in imminent danger or that there's some other extreme circumstance. The general public is often not granted concealed. The District of Columbia has concealed. So pulling that apart is important because what we normally hear is, oh, the person got the firearm overnight. Well, what's the rule in that state? What's the regulation? What is the state when we really look further? Is there a period of waiting? Do they do an investigation? Or did the person cross the border? And when I say cross the border, they cross to another state where the regulations are a little bit easier, a little more flexible. And really talking about that. And again, the open carry, I know I have a friend who lives in Texas. Texas is open carry. I can tell you, again, as a firearm owner, open carry frightens me. There's no reason you need to be in the supermarket with your shotgun, assault rifle, or your Glock 46 on you. But I think part of it is the glamourization of firearms. We see it in the movies.  And the truth of the matter is it's a huge responsibility. When I took my training, the one thing that I walked away with was when the instructor said, you now have an instrument that can kill someone. That is a lot of responsibility. What are you going to do with it? How are you going to possess that responsibility? How are you going to manage that responsibility? So I'm all for doing the diagnostics to make sure that someone is mentally stable and spending the time to find out how many firearms. Marilyn, you can't buy more than one firearm. If you want to get a second firearm, you have to wait another 30 days. I know I said a lot, but I just wanted to put that thread because I think it's important for people to know it just doesn't happen randomly. And it's in many states it's a very lengthy process or it can be a lengthy process. The idea of going in, oh, I like that CZ9. I'll take it today. A responsible gun owner or gun shop is going to say, nope, I don't want to lose my license. I don't want to be fined or shut down. It's going to take 30 days. We will put the gun aside for you, but we have to go through the proper steps. Exactly. There's a lot of states in which I've been to states and I looked in pawn shops and stuff and walked in and said, can I buy that gun? He goes, yeah, just give me an idea. I take the idea. You can have this gun. So there's a lot of states you just walk in and you can buy it. There's no waiting period for that.  So yeah, everything. It's not aiming at them. Exactly. Yeah. No, no, no. So yeah, so that's a really legitimate question is, you know, do we regulate, do we properly regulate dangerous instruments? Some people say we don't. Some people get licenses to drive cars that shouldn't be driving cars. Exactly. I think that's what the 1968 Gun Control Act was putting to existence because there was a myriad of regulations across the country and the Gun Control Act tried to put into place an umbrella coverage to say that, number one, if you're a felon, you can't possess a firearm under federal law. So no matter what the state law says, if you're a felon, you're in violation of federal law if you possess a firearm. Okay. And they had other regulations that went into place to try to patch the holes between the various states. But still, yeah, you know, it's amazing. You can walk into some states and just buy a firearm. The other point that Tina brought up that's directly related is besides regulation, education, what proportion of gun owners would you guess actually have had significant firearm education, gun use education? Are you asking me? I think that the vast minority of them too. Yeah, I think so. Might be single digits. Exactly.  They're they're teaching their kids how to use, you know, to use those kinds of weapons and to do it safely and how you store it and where you keep it and all of those kinds of things. I think people who are, I do believe that those that are responsible gun owners and I think quite honestly, probably the majority are responsible. I mean, just like what Tina is talking about with, you know, with her own, you know, with her own possession, you're understanding the significance of what you're doing and what you're holding. And I think most people do realize that. Unfortunately, what ends up happening is that while we have these discussions is that there is these ones that pop up like these shootings of people who don't have that sense, who don't have that training, and they're already having to deal with other kinds of issues. And so we end up, you know, with situations where, you know, there's a school shooting, there's a, you know, there's a church, there's a people in the church, there's the ladies in their, you know, in their spas, there's the people in grocery stores, there's the people, I mean, those, I mean, I don't want to minimize them, but I think what you're pointing out is that, you know, besides the regulation issue, which is a huge one, we can't even get a consensus on that, but the waiting period sounds like a good move. But there's the whole mental health issue too. And then what is the responsibility of people, do they know enough to point out? Because just in these two last two incidents, it seemed like there were wrench lights along the way here with, you know, in the first, the Tuesday, Kate murder, he was, he was having psychological problems. And then his parents apparently shut him out of the house. And then he was left on his own to go buy a gun and then take it out on innocent people. And then with this recent one too, there were talks about how he had anger management issues, his family saw him playing with a rifle. You know, there must have been signs along the way. And yet, there just seems to be this whole level of lack of family and personal responsibility going on. I'm curious, because you mentioned something, and I've been noticing this and I've been hearing this, especially in the midst of the pandemic, there's been an increase in the number of domestic violence reports. And firearm usage is usually part of that. In addition to beating, sometimes the the victim is shot or fatally wounded with a firearm. And oftentimes you mentioned upon shop William that that's generally the way that you could easily possess a firearm versus going through a proper channel. But I was wondering, Louise, if you would share a perspective regarding this correlation between firearms being used in a as a weapon of power, especially when we're talking about domestic or oppressing a group that you believe is either inferior or needs to be tamped down. Yeah, well, we certainly have seen, you know, I think there's there's data that shows that there's an uptake in domestic violence because of our shutdown. And more more often than not, it seems like it's gun violence that causes the murder or the serious injury. So I mean, that's a whole other level. I'm not sure how you spot it, how do you prevent those situations? Regulation is one thing. But again, I think it goes back to just needing to have resources and community resources to attend people's health and give them safe places to go or safe outlets or, you know, ways to get anger management. And that's a really important point, Louise, because hey, the minute that somebody brings a domestic violence or temporary restraining or a complaint, first thing that goes all the guns, you can have all the knives you want, all the poison you want, all the dynamite you want, no guns. But guns got to go. Yeah, the presumption shifts. So it keeps bringing me back and everything I'm hearing keeps bringing me back to why shouldn't there be a presumption that gun use ownership need to a be established with conditions. And one of those conditions be education and responsible use. Well, there should be absolutely. But then if you think about it, the very fabric of our country and those who were Second Amendment proponents is we have liberty and freedom in the United States. And we and you got to understand how we became a country, right? We ran away from Britain, we ran away from the King going into your house, the troops coming in and doing what they wanted to do. And the whole idea was if we have guns, no one's going to do that. The government's not going to walk into your house and do what they did in Britain. So that's part of our fabric of our country. So how you disabuse people of that belief that they have the liberty to possess weapons. And then when you start, when you basically put regulations in place to provide buffers so they can't get weapons, they're basically saying, look, the timelines are not there to protect people. The timelines are there to keep guns out of my hand. And I don't want those timelines there. I don't want those regulations there because I have that Second Amendment right. That's, it's part of our constitution. So, you know, it's, that's a difficult issue to deal with. If we go, if we go back, Bill, to the Second Amendment, if the only people that could have guns or did have guns, who were a well, well regulated militia, we would not be talking about this. Yeah, you know, but the problem is, is that the other side says, you know what a well regulated militia was back in, in, in, you know, the time, the formation of the country, those are folks who got together in a town and say, why is it not coming into my house? Okay, that's what they consider them. They didn't consider it, you know, our, our state, you know, armed forces that we have in each individual state and etc. It was folks who basically said, you're not coming into our houses. And so once a week and be a citizen patrol, that, that's the militia at the other side argues that we have, but we also know that if we went back to that point in time and determine the intent, according to that, oh, only one of the five of us that would be able to vote our own property. That too. That too. Yeah. But I think it was mentioned on Vice President Terrace had mentioned this whole discussion about, you know, taking away guns and doing regulations is sort of like this false equivalency. This is this one has nothing to do with the other. And, and what you're, you're talking about, but I think it's, it's still part of that. I mean, I, it's difficult for me to conceptualize that responsible people are adamantly against having some reasonable regulations on the perhaps the type of weapons you can possess and who can, who can obtain them as opposed to someone saying the purpose of any sort of regulation is to literally take away my right to have guns. That's not even the discussion. That's not even what we're talking about, but it keeps getting bounced back to being we're talking about, you're going to take away the guns. And that's not the discussion. That's not what we're talking about. I mean, it's not what we're talking about. It's just finding some way to, to do a reasonable regulation. And I think in Hawaii, we do have some fairly reasonable, you know, regulations on who can possess and, and how you can obtain because I think our concealed, our weapons laws are similar to what you're talking about, Tina, about where, where you can have the gun, the gun has to be in a container, it has to be in your trunk. It has to be, you know, on your way to, you know, the range or someplace that you can carry. It's not, yeah, I can just walk around and hitch it to my jeans belt. That's not quite how it's done here either. So we have those kind of really strict regulations about that. And, and, and people comply with that. Yeah. Actually, we have the strictest gun laws in the nation, Hawaii has. Okay, so I think sorry, we're running out of time. I wanted to say this because following up on what Sandra said, the, so the conflated argument, what that results in is, and we've seen this in the past two years, a run on firearms. So whether it's assault weapons or handguns, suddenly they're not available or the price has increased 25, 30%. At one point in 2020 ammunition was not available in many gun shops. And it was because people were stockpiling. That's where the conflated argument goes. Chuck, I also wanted to touch quickly upon the correlation with hate crimes and, and the use of firearms. And it's because of the easy access and because of the, the, the regulations varying if there are any and open carry versus concealed. And I think about Dylan Roof and the fact that he literally sat in a church, waited until people had closed their eyes for prayer and then didn't shoot off one or two bullets. He had the equivalent of 70 bullets. He had rounds, a magazine, he had several magazines. So he literally had to discharge that magazine, load it back in the gun and continue with what he was doing. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, think about the matrix. When Nia was in one of those scenes, he literally is dropping and inserting magazines. It's intentional. And that's where the, the, the correlation between the anger and using this, this weapon as a means to destroy really, for many of us who consider ourselves rational, prudent people, we can't make the connection. But my personal opinion is that's where it's coming from. It's, it's instantaneous.  These weak people, a sense of power. Yeah, right. It's a power tool. It is. It is. Well, here's the question then. Is it really the underlying attitudes and behaviors, including the discrimination, the race, the ethnic, the LGBTQ, all of it, that generate the abuses for which gun access is a means. It's an avenue. And others who don't want their so-called Second Amendment rights, rights intruded upon, wind up protecting the abusers because of their own, exactly what Sandra said, the polarized attitudes, behaviors and communications that we degenerated into. And that's the tide that needs to be reversed. So I guess you put out the deeper problem, Choc, which is, okay, gun regulation is one thing, but we have a whole problem here with hate and division. Yes. And, you know, the failure to, to tolerate each other and recognize differences. And, and then that gives people the feeling that they need some little, you know, this tool to act out their insecurities. Exactly. So last words, everybody. Bill?  Okay, you have to be visceral. You have to go and you have to struggle with someone. Pulling a trigger is easy. And so it is, it is a cowardice weapon. And put in the wrong hands. It does what we see happen in our day to day existence nowadays. And there, and I agree. And then as, as we, there's some things that we need to be paying more attention to when it comes to these issues of who goes and has the bills that they need to do that kind of power trip over people. And that's a lot of it is still mental health. And we still need to address those issues. There's still the stigma, you know, attached to that. There's still, you know, family members who are, you know, maybe looking at a situation and afraid to act, not knowing how to act, not knowing what they can or cannot do. And then the person acts out, there's a gun and they act out. I mean, that's what we had in this situation last weekend was, again, family that kind of knew something was amiss. There's something was wrong. And then, you know, he takes it out on, on these women in various locations. So again, very intentional, very intentional, driving from one place to the next to the next to the next.  I'll just be real honest. I'm just shaken by all of this. I don't really know how to respond. I'm trying to like everybody else trying to figure out how, why, where do we get, how do we get to this, to this place? How do we, how do we wind back so we can talk to each other without it being I got to pull out my gun and blow you away because I disagree with you. We got to pull it back. We got to pull it back. Well, that's all the time that we have today. Let's give that some thought. Because a lot of underlying issues, people issues, attitude issues, behavior issues, behavioral abuse issues, societal connections of mental of regulation and many other things and education. Thank you all. Come back and see us in two more weeks. We will be back April 8th. And thank you for joining us. Think back Hawaii time for responsible change. Thank you, Chuck. Thank you, guys. Thank you.


In terms of ways, again, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions we tend to have efficiency at the top of our loading order and that we'll talk a lot some today about energy efficiency. Also combined heat and power, some of us refer to that as cogeneration from the old days, but anyway that is one way of achieving more efficiency in industrial processes and buildings. Also renewables, obviously shifting our power mix to more sustainable resources and again between two of us we'll talk a little bit about where we are towards the 33% goal, but at this stage the utilities in the state are at 20% and all have contracts to get to 33%. If anything our challenge now is looking at the next step beyond that frankly. One of the energy commission programs is the San Diego 118 alternative and renewable fuels and vehicle technology program. Again certainly one of our defining challenges is what to do. On the transportation sector we've done a variety of programs there to try to encourage alternative technologies, charging stations, hydrogen refueling stations, you know, a variety of different technologies and again in a way it's a drop in the bucket for the transportation system, but again some progress on that front. Other big challenge we have frankly are jobs in the economy in California and certainly all of us are concerned about how to revitalize California and see the way to do that is through innovation. And so basically again looking at our key challenges I tend to put as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, reviving the economy and tend to see that bringing jobs in through innovation and particularly in the energy areas. In terms of contingency planning I guess one of the things to talk about is one way the organizations work together is as I mentioned we have a statewide planning study in the independent energy policy report and last year's report we had a chapter on nuclear power which was motivated pretty much by the Japanese tragedy but also looking at what we were doing in California looking at seismic studies the legislature would really like to use some of the 3D imaging to better understand the fault systems around San Androfre and Diablo Canyon and so we had a workshop and it was an unusual event in that it was a combined workshop of the Energy Commission and PUC and so myself and Jim Boyd from the Energy Commission, Commissioner Sandoval and Mike Florio were at the hearing based upon that we came up with a report or chapter in the report which really identified a series of actions that again the four of us agreed upon and one of the proposals we had was we felt that it was important to look at the implications of either sustained outages at the plants or if they were not re-licensed. By sustained outages if you look at the nuclear fleet nationwide it's not unusual to have a one year outage and in terms of looking at the two plants in California Diablo Canyon is relatively remote in the PG&E system. It doesn't you know from a reliability perspective it's you know it provides power but its location is not critical. San Androfre is really embedded in the LA system. The transmission system is built around that and as we'll talk about in terms of this summer it was clear that a sustained outage there would have real implications from a reliability perspective. So we asked the California system operator to do transmission planning looking at what the impacts were for either a sustained outage or if they're not re-licensed. They agreed to do that obviously the governor was very supportive of that and they started launching a plan to do that this year. Well then it turned out as issues came up at San Androfre that we really had to some respects narrow the focus and look at what the implications of San Androfre being at the summer were. And so the Cal ISO sort of shortened what they were doing to look at this summer and it turned out there are reliability issues. And so coming out of that certainly the PUC the Energy Commission and Cal ISO came up with a joint action plan and you know moving forward we are implementing it. We started during the planning sort of on the worst case basis but it turned out that we need it the bottom line. In terms of the actions one of them is to return Huntington Beach 3 and 4 to service. So if you look at this chart it gives you a sense I think one of the classic charts that you're probably certainly will see again but anyway I just want to indicate that there aren't there's only two power plants in Orange County Huntington Beach and San Androfre. And so when San Androfre is down it has re-implications on the voltage support in Orange County it also has implications on how much power you can import from LA into San Diego. So by bringing up bringing back Huntington Beach 3 and 4 which are two well more LBJ vintage power plants but at least they have SCR on them that had been retired because of for their offsets to be shift to another power plant that they still have the offsets so the permit so we brought that back online that's over 400 megawatts that helps the capacity in the LA basin also helps in the ability to import power into San Diego. That arc there is sort of below Lugo so what we really are looking at at the Los Angeles Basin the San Diego basin and the LA basin more or less the Orange County part is what we're talking about. So the next thing we did is accelerate the Bury Ellis transmission upgrade and again going back that's a transmission line that's up in that area you can see the upgrade there and that was a line that us and proposed had been planning to do but they got it online by June 1st. The next thing we did was complete the Sunrise transmission line and there's some related out of outage planning that's sort of in process at this point but anyway looking back again you can see the Sunrise power link going into San Diego it helps there's there are issues with it as you can it actually started week we could go last Sunday it was energized it's been operating relatively securely at this point as you can tell that and and the Southwest power link both have a similar terminus coming in from Imperial Valley at the IV substation and they both parallel each other for part of the way and then diverge where they parallel or the areas without high vegetation is the good news or without much vegetation. Talk about those issues in a second. We also did fully flood of flex alerts and I think Commissioner Sandoval will talk and set a real strong interest in making sure that does have a broad base for community organization of our different communities and also talking about fully utilizing available demand response and again this is a little unusual in the sense that we talk we can talk about demand response say in the Edison service territory but we really in this for the summer are looking at Orange County you know so a portion of the overall demand response so and was also trying to identify what we can do sort of in the in the half hour function along with what we can do to push downloads the next day we've reached out to the military and public agencies in San Diego we've been working we at the Energy Commission been working very closely with the Navy and Marines on a number of initiatives in San Diego so it's pretty easy to reach out to them and see what they could do they are SD Genies largest single customer and so again there's a lot of opportunities for them and they have just filed a special SD Genies just filed a special tariff with the PUC to allow them to take more opportunities demand response there and then finally we looked at ensuring the existing generation is well maintained and available in San Diego some of the power plants are 40 to 50 years old and so it's a little scary relying on those but basically the Cal ISO has gone out checked out the maintenance on all this and made sure in scheduling obviously we're sending off we down the gas units are running more but sort of juggled the schedule so they could do the required maintenance in the springtime before we get to the peaks basically I think working together we're pretty well prepared as I said we're doing a pretty worst case obviously things happen you know an example was last year there was an outage in in San Diego that was an N minus 1 in September so hopefully no one has a similar slip up this summer but probably our biggest fear frankly and that's where the flex alerts come in is if you have like three or four days of a heat storm in San Diego that we really need to be reaching out to people on those day critical days critical hours of those days to really reduce the demand and also in those periods of time obviously along with the heat storms always worried about fires fires particularly on the transmission line and SD Gini has done some fairly interesting things in that context they've since the real disasters in 207 they now have drones to go to the fire areas they've changed a lot of the demand their distribution system to be able to monitor things better they have two full-time meteorologists so again certainly we we are pretty comfortable in the one in ten circumstance but you know if things go beyond that we certainly we need everyone engaged to help in those circumstances so that's sort of an example of one of the real-time ways that we're certainly working together and I think coming out of this year presumably will be better positioned to deal with the longer-term issues obviously Santa no free three is not going to be back next summer to there's some hope it might be but we will certainly will be planning as if neither will be back in terms of our energy goals looking at renewables you know sort of the one of the things that sort of a real fundamental change of storage if we can get cheap electricity storage that's really a game-changer for the industry and so again looking at the ways we work together is the energy commission you know through our peer program have been doing a lot of work in storage a lot of demonstrations we tried to really key off you know the our grant money to try to work with different energy entities in California to do demonstrations of storage in California to get experience both on a utility scale and also more at a distributive scale one of the things that's very important on storage was sort of highlight is the ramp rates I mean some of the some of the stuff responds very quickly others less so obviously if you're looking more at dealing with renewable variation you know at this stage where as a war 20 we're going to go a lot further higher on the renewables but even at this point you could the cal ISO is experiencing for the wind systems fluctuations of a thousand megawatts within an hour so that that that has to be responded to obviously going forward I would expect that number to double or triple and so the total amount of winds are getting the variation to go up and similarly with storage with solar you know as you go through the solar systems although again that's dispersed around the state but particularly a lot of our DG is in the coastal areas we have the coastal fog come in you can again expect to see big variations there and those solar and wind variations are different in terms of likely characteristics and certainly they're different than the likely load shifts obviously if you look at the system in the morning the loads go up that happens to be when the wind speeds generally are going down the solar is starting to come up you look at the end of the day the loads are dropping off although not as fast as certainly the solar would drop off and as the wind come up comes up so if you look at that combination storage is a key way of trying to smooth that out along with demand response if we can package that together I think we have a much cheaper there have been some recent FERC actions again what I hear from generally from that industry is there isn't a business case now for how you really get the world storage out you know one of the examples is PG&E's pump storage project at Helms they should be putting in variable speed motors there but the basic and they've looked at it a couple times the question is well what's the revenue source that they would get for setting off setting that and it comes back to what in a wholesale how's our wholesale market set up to value and pay for storage services and again as I said there's a proceeding at the PUC that's looking at this and certainly they're proceeding to FERC on the wholesale side so basically storage is critical for what we need to do the other issue I'm going to focus a little bit on it is one of the goals that we're trying to move the state towards zero net energy housing for residential in 2020 for commercial in 2030 and we just adopted as said the Energy Commission has been doing building standards from its beginning I tend to think that's one things that really turns around our energy use in California and so we've just adopted new standards on May 31st one of those are solar ready these are some of the features I won't go into that but generally they will cut energy consumption housing by about 25% and there's our obviously by their cost effective we could have pushed the numbers a lot higher and frankly in terms of cost effectiveness but we really needed to respect the status of the building industry at this time but again this is the sort of program where I'll talk a little bit later we did a lot of the R&D at the Energy Commission to prove these technologies we then worked with the PUC and utilities to provide incentives and move these out into the building industry and into housing and over time as they were proven we've now moved them into the standards this gives you a sense of where where we have gone over time at the Energy Commission on these title 24 building standards and at the same time where we need to go in the future to get to zero net energy and again one of the key things to get the zero net energy frankly will be not only the shell tightening that up which we will do another round of 2017 another round of 2020 but basically reducing plug load and plug load is you know remember we're doing forecasting in the 70s you know we never quite well obviously we weren't thinking of computers we weren't thinking of direct TV or any of those devices at this point one of the things we did be earlier this year is put in place a battery charger standards talk about proliferation the average California household has 11 chargers and you know at some of those chargers basically if you feel those they're hot and we we put in the requirement that a sensor be put into the chargers to realize when the battery is full to turn off the charging and relatively simple concept and again saves a lot of energy this is the proverbial vampire power that you've all heard about is trying to deal with that and now we're looking at additional plant standards this year questions of what are that we've said in place an OI are looking at what that should be looking at industry and the participants but you know is it computers servers set top boxes LED I mean we've actually as part of our have rolled out over 17,000 LEDs and streetlights in California and most of these polls people are only going to visit once in 50 years so we're trying to make sure that those installations are done right and they include some degree of demand response built in so anyway but that's an industry where we're concerned about making sure that it's not a race to poor quality but that in fact we maintain quality standards there last thing is obviously innovation's got to drive California this is as I said going forward in the building stands we just adopt it with the peer research which developed the foundation for that also on the battery chargers that you know let's do research that we fund it at this point again working with the PUC we could not get a two-thirds vote to get that built get that program extended last year the PUC is just adopted the EPIC program and again that will maintain our focus on innovation in California thank you good morning everybody welcome and thank you very much for being here it's always a pleasure and honor to be back at Stanford I went to the Stanford Law School so it's wonderful to be back here also I should remember every time it took me longer to find a parking place and it did to drive here so I saw many of you out there with me looking for parking spaces so glad we all made it to the room so thank you very much so wanted to talk to you a little bit about what the California Public Utilities Commission is doing to also help to analyze and address California's energy future and thank Chairman Weismiller both for his presentation and just for the tremendously collegial relationship that we've had with the California Energy Commission we've been a real partner in planning many things and they've also done a wonderful job through their leadership in long-term planning and analysis since we talk about the California Public Utilities Commission I'd like to say just a little bit about our fundamental mission when you look at the California Public Utilities Code the laws which govern our work it's it's huge it's about this big but really it all boils down to one sentence which is that our mission is to ensure that utilities provide safe reliable service at just and reasonable rates everything else really flows from this mission and I think it's also important to recognize that the code put safety first and so too much the California Energy Commission and the California Public Utilities Commission so this is certainly driven some of our work and analysis with regard to Santa no fray and so we'll come back to Santa no fray in a minute but as we look at the tremendous challenges the horrible tragedy of San Bruno and the loss of the eight lives and in the gas explosion that happened there in 2010 it really has caused a fundamental re-evaluation of the work of the Public Utilities Commission and the utilities and the passage of law to ensure to ensure for example that where there is money that has been allocated for safety or maintenance and operations that it is spent on safety maintenance and operations and not shifted this last week we had a seminar conference on safety and there were representatives there from the Metro Authority in Washington DC talking about the analysis of the terrible train crash that happened at Fort Totten there and it's really caused them to reevaluate what does it mean to have a safety culture and they actually had a slide up from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that also pointed out that a safety culture exalts safety as a value over other competing values and I think it's also important to talk about you know often safety and efficiency are set up as competing values and they also showed us some evidence that in fact they were not competing a value of values and in fact sometimes safety could help not only efficiency but also profitability and that in the airline industry and also the freight and passenger train industry as accidents have gone down that costs have gone down now actually the the primary other driver that keeps costs going up is fuel costs but it's not about safety so that the emphasis on safety can not only save lives and property and fines and years of litigation as a lawyer I was certainly trained to do litigation but I cannot say it is the first and foremost thing that I love but but that we should look at how we can promote these systems in a way so that they are both safe and reliable as well as provided at rates that are just and reasonable so as we're looking at that part of our overarching goals and I think this spent in some ways fits into reliability and important concepts of sustainability is to look at how we can also reduce per capita energy use through efficiency and conservation I know that this building was built as a very efficient building I believe it's actually a zero net energy building it certainly leads certified building but that's why we've got these blinds behind us and we also want to ensure that there are enough energy resources to meet the demand and Governor Brown has also embraced and indeed increased the goal to promote the use of renewable power in our state both to give us alternatives as well as one part of the strategy to help to decrease the impacts of California's energy services on global warming so I'm going to talk to you for a few minutes today about our program to promote the use of renewables also safety reliability and demand response focusing on Santa Nofre complimenting some of things that chairman Weiss Miller talked about as well as some of our programs on innovation so the renewable portfolio standard program was instituted in 2002 and California has been a real leader so it's been 10 years that we've really been actively pursuing the renewable portfolio standard program which which began a decade ago and so in 2011 under Governor Brown the target was increased from 20% of all of our generation being renewable to 33% by the year 2020 and we are well on our way to meeting that goal indeed if you looked at all of the renewable projects that are in the queue of the California independent system operator that helps to plan some of the the plants that will go on the grid that we would be able to meet and exceed that 33% goal so in addition to that Governor Brown has also set a goal of 12,000 megawatts of distributed renewable generation these would be things like solar roofs also windmills and parking lots if you drive on the 80 and Hauser-Busch has a windmill in their parking lot and other types of distributed generation so we implement this in part through the procurement process whereby the CPUC approves RPS procurement plans the IOUs hold a solicitation which it says annual solicitation it's been more or less annual and this is one of the things that I've argued for is that we need to have a little bit more stability in terms of how frequent the solicitations are going to be so that people could plan for their solicitations they also rank bids pursuant to the least cost best fit methodology and taking into account a variety of issues like not just what is the price being offered but also the profile of the energy can be very important because one of the things for example solar photovoltaic is often one of the cheapest of the renewable types of resources now but as a chairman Weissman mentioned it is also subject to clouds passing over and reducing its production so I know I woke up this morning to clouds I live in Campbell it was it was as if I had woken up in Monterey where I was yesterday whereas yesterday Monterey was a bright sunny day and the seagulls woke me up at five o'clock in the morning but it was very very sunny so but when we look at photovoltaic production their production tends to be greatest between 12 o'clock and four o'clock and after four o'clock often starts to decline even when you know here in the Bay Area that we're lucky that often the sun will stay up during the summer until almost nine o'clock but the production really begins to decline at four well this is really not ideal because peak energy usage is between four and six especially during the summer and a second peak is growing after six o'clock which really is driven by all of us coming home starting to cook turning on TVs those of you have plasma TVs be sure to get energy efficiency ones and plugging in your cell phones you know and so one of the greatest areas of demand that has been increasing is plug load and so plug load is that in fact the fastest increasing area of demand so I really applaud the Energy Commission for working to develop new standards you know I try to deal with it in part by by just unplugging but you know you have to check is your battery full and my husband a couple of weeks ago got a new cell phone he was very excited he like had planned a whole Saturday so that he could play with his phone and one of the features that he's most excited about is that when he plugs in his phone you hear the voice of Yoda say charging it is and and then when it's full it says full it is charging completed it is so hopefully charged it is and it is Yoda's voice he's so excited so but it stops that process but anyway so you know it's something that we need to be mindful of and it's one of the reasons why solar PV is only part of the solution and that's part of the solution is that we need a diversity of solutions so we also look at solar thermal which because it heats up water that is used to create steam can hang on and produce a little bit longer but as we look at other other resources such as thermal which doesn't have those same limitations wind of course is also periodic so this is part of the reason why we have to look at a portfolio of solutions also part of the best fit has to do with issues like proximity to transmission interconnection these issues all affect costs and so we evaluate these issues and also where they are in terms of how they will be able to serve the load serving entities and then they eventually are presented to the CPUC for analysis and potential approval so we now have over two thousand five hundred megawatts of new capacity online due to the RPS program and they are well on target to meet their goals so we'll see where the investor owned utilities are now and we're well on target to getting to the 33% goal by 2020 so we also see the number of highly viable projects has increased significantly and this has also been one of the issues in the past that a lot of projects would get in the queue be approved but then would fail to materialize and so we're seeing a lot of maturation in the industry and in fact that also the IOUs are insisting that the projects go through more permitting and environmental review before being even considered for a contract so that they can address issues such as the environmental issues that affect people animals and also habitat so one of the things that we've seen is just also tremendously increasing participation by solar PV in our renewable projects as well as increasing participation by wind and we are also looking at certainly biomass and biogas as well as geothermal but solar PV lately has been really the story largely because of price so wanted to talk to you a little bit about Santa no fray and this also gets to the issue of long-term procurement so to complement what chairman Weiss Miller was saying you know as you as you look at this map and here we are in northern California I'm from Los Angeles from East LA and then from Montebello and having gone to Stanford Law School I now realize that actually I have spent most of my adult life in northern California with brief interruptions of living back in Los Angeles and in Washington DC and as we look at our great state of California it is a very large and incredibly diverse state there are 38 million people who live in the state of California and 26 million of them live in southern California that is why the traffic is worse there I was there a couple of weeks ago and had the honor of giving a speech at a graduation ceremony for a program that helps K through 12 kids and their parents prepare for college starting in kindergarten and got caught in a terrible traffic jam in Los Angeles at five o'clock at night on a Saturday well that's what happens when you have 10 million people who live in Los Angeles County so you know this is a very congested area this is where the bulk of our population lives and unfortunately it is also tremendously congested in terms of power resources and we still have although starting really a decade ago when I worked in the Davis administration and my boss was on the independent system operator many of us live through the energy crisis of a decade ago we really worked on eliminating some of the constraints which eliminated power constraints throughout our state such as path 15 but we still have constraints in past 26 which constrained the ability of power to move north to south and in fact as we've gone through the plans for the summer we recognize that past 26 is one of the things that would constrain the ability of PG need to send excess power into Los Angeles so songs very nice name for a nuclear power plant don't you think the Santa no frame nuclear generating systems songs so so songs provides approximately 19% of the power to San Diego gas and electric and approximately 17% of the power to Southern California Edison but its role is much greater than that because it also provides what we call voltage support as well as transmission support that has been critical to be able to move power around the area and even to import power so you know one of the vulnerabilities that we identified in the IPER report was looking at well what if there were prolonged outage and certainly the tragedy Fukushima you know made us take a take a fundamental look at other issues and vulnerabilities including power outages that could happen at the at the plant and you know it seems that that report that was led by chairman Weiss and Miller and we collaborated on the nuclear energy part of the report that it was prescient and also saying that we needed to prepare for a prolonged outage of both units at songs so there are two units at songs there's unit two and three unit one was decommissioned many years ago because of some issues at unit one so there are there are two units units two and three but when you look at the independent system operator which is in Sacramento and they run at the electricity grid for the state of California their long-term plans and their contingency planning never planned for both units two and three of songs to be out for a long period of time they always assumed that at least one unit would be available so what is happening right now is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is still going through its analysis of the issues at songs Edison has been working very hard on this and Edison is the principal operator of songs they've had the best minds and consultants in the world looking at this and you know they have publicly said that what is happening is that inside the tubes that carry the steam and the water that are used to help to turn the turbine and make electricity that there is excess vibration and so this is causing the tubes which are metal tubes to lose contact with the supports and that excess vibration in at least one case they believe contributed to a leak that happened in January it was a small radioactive leak so they say equivalent to a chest x-ray but nonetheless is a reportable incident for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and and I think appropriately caused inspection to determine what the issue was so a number of tubes have been plugged up and these things are designed so that if you have a tube that is not operating properly you can plug up the tube and just use other tubes but the question is is the vibration so excessive that it's going to cause a long-term problem so the Nuclear Regulatory Commission revealed a couple of weeks ago in a meeting that it held in San Juan Capistrana that they believed that one of the causes for this excess vibration was a failure in the computer model that was conducted by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries which is in Japan when they predicted how much vibration would happen with these tubes at the time that they replaced the generator a couple of years ago so the NRC is still evaluating whether or not that is in fact the cause but also the other question is what is the solution so the independent system operator has now said that you know we must plan for both units of songs to be out this summer and that we must plan for both units of songs to be out next summer so right now the meteorologists at Edison and San Diego gas and electric as well as NOAA research has revised its forecast so that they are predicting an average summer in the San Diego and Orange County areas earlier this year they had been predicting above average summer in terms of temperature so we are hoping for continuation of June gloom and cloud so that it won't heat up but we are more likely to see heat particularly in this area in Orange County it was it should start heating up sometime after the 4th of July and in San Diego County they tend to have their hottest months in August and in California as a whole year in year out the hottest days have often been in September so that is also when we must be really careful so we've done everything that we can I believe to bring back existing generation resources like Huntington Beach to speed up the power links and also to move forward with our our flex alerts and demand response so this is going to be really important because if you know we've done what we can on the supply side in terms of generation units and also transmission the flex alerts as well as San Diego's reduce your use campaign will be asking people on hot days particularly when it is hot for two or three days in a row to reduce their demand and as chairman Weiss Miller said whoops that you know one of the things that I thought was important going back to this map as we look at the flex alert campaigns is that when you look at Huntington Beach and songs they are in Orange County now we might have an image of Orange County the Beach Boys but Orange County today is not your father's Orange County it is not the Orange County of when I graduated from high school Orange County is now and has been since 2006 majority minority it is majority Latino and Asian and there are communities there such as Santa Ana which is one of the communities that is most at risk for potential power imbalances that is a Latino majority city other cities such as guard Garden Grove that are also at risk for power imbalances very very large Vietnamese population Orange County and San Jose will wrestle each other for who has the largest Vietnamese population in the United States so it's important that our message also reaches out to the diversity of people who are likely to be affected by potential power shortages and San Diego County of course is incredibly diverse on the Mexican border very large Latino community many people there are predominantly Spanish speaking large Vietnamese community again their large African American community very diverse communities so we're we really have worked very closely with the utilities with the CEC the ISO and others in the state to ensure that we are reaching out to the diversity of California so they're likely to be affected including the elderly and people who are on medical baseline programs so basically we've got a number of of entities that have already committed to Dan demand response the military has been incredibly helpful in looking at their demand response and we're also talking to the telecom companies and the wireless companies about what they can do to help out with this situation and as well they are very large energy users how they can reduce their use now a lot of us also have cell phones I know I have two in my purse and many people think well if the power goes out I'll just use my cell phone but make sure that you know that even if you have a solar charger for your cell phone that your cell phone will only work as long as the corresponding tower that your cell phone is trying to reach has power and there were no standards for power backup at cell phone towers until Hurricane Katrina and the FCC realized that this was a major vulnerability because many people tried to call and you know the the towers didn't fall down but they just had no power I met recently with some people from Japan and they said that this also happened in the Fukushima area that is people were leaving their houses as they saw the tsunami coming they grabbed their cell phones and ran it's interesting that that's one of the things they grabbed they grabbed their cell phones and their children right child in one hand cell phone in the other interesting priority and ran up the hell only to be very disappointed that the cell phones didn't work because they had no power backup requirements for the cell phone towers now since then Japan has instituted a requirement of 24 hours of power backup on cell phone towers in the United States the requirement is eight hours so just be aware that after eight hours your corresponding tower may lose power most of them rely on diesel power so one of the things that we've asked is you know think about should you have a plan to run around and fill up the tanks and one of the things that happened when there was the blackout in San Diego when somebody cut the line in Arizona is that also all the gas stations stopped working so luckily the power stayed on in the Southern California Edison area and so people were able some people were able to coast to Temecula and to be able to get gas so yeah so here if you were in PG&E territory we've got a long way to go to coast Edison territory so and then just to quickly mention about the epic program so we've taken a fresh look at the epic program and before I get into epic I also wanted to mention that we're looking at this with regard as well to the long-term procurement program so if you know if I can go back to this when we when we talk about energy planning you know and how do these plants get here there's a lot of planning and it takes many years to get a plant sighted permitted but one of the things that we're also looking at with regard to long-term procurement is that years ago the California adopted rules that basically allow power plants to compete for a 10-year contract and then after that they compete for summer what we call resource adequacy contracts so just imagine if after all your schooling go into the best universities like Stanford then that you could get one 10-year job and then afterwards had to compete for a series of summer jobs that you were not guaranteed now this seemed interesting to me and it was designed at a time when we were really trying to foster new generation because at the time of the energy crisis in California 10 years ago California was under resourced although of course when you look at what actually happened that led to the blackouts there was not actually a lack of power was more an issue of market manipulation but as we look at resources and the question of something like songs and will it be available in the future when just overnight 19% of your power is gone we have to look at both how can we use our existing resources as well as well as what new resources we should foster so one of the things that we're looking at in the long-term procurement plan is whether or not existing generation resources should be able to compete for another 10-year contract because many of these these plants are built for a 30-year life so when we get back to just and reasonable rates that this is also something that can help keep rates lower if they are able to compete for the other contracts so in closing looking at the epic program and what we funded and so we've created a new program called epic and so we'll have 55 million dollars of funding annually for applied research and development 75 million for technology demonstration and deployment and 15 million for market facilitation so and then we're going to be working with the CEC that will help us to administer some of these funds and also the CPUC will provide a program oversight for these funds because we really want to be able to foster programs such as storage if we could store energy that would be a game changer for all types of energy and that the storage has really been a priority for Governor Brown as well as for the California Public Utilities Commission so we have big challenges and big opportunities and collaboration and your interest in participation are going to be very important in this process and so we're hearing flex alert campaigns here in Northern California as well I've heard lots of them on the radio remember when we asked you to flex your power we're not asking you to just take a yoga stretch this is about reducing your electrical use and being wise about your use so so listen to Yoda when he says fully charged it is and think about how you can reduce your use thank you so much we have time for a few questions and I'd actually like to encourage people to go ahead and line up at the microphone I know that takes a little bit longer but that way I think it's a little bit more of a fair process so please go ahead hi I'm interested in virtual net metering which is getting your utility bill credited for buying into an off-site solar solar farm and a bill just passed the utility and commerce committee in the state legislature that would set up a utility or a virtual net metering program in California can you comment on some of like the challenges that virtual net metering would pose to the existing utilities so I think virtual net net metering is an important resource but it also poses challenges you know we're really I'm a law professor of any trust law as well as communications law and contracts and and you know from a perspective of any trust and competition we're really undergoing a fundamental change or we're having more competition and options for our energy resources but we also have to look at what challenges does this present for the grid the electrical grid including the distribution grid was really designed for power that would that comes from these big plants and that power for you electrical engineers out there was designed so that it has a profile that's like this in terms of the energy waves that it produces so one of the issues with solar PV in particular is that it produces energy like this so that has a real impact on transformers because they were not ever designed to handle this level fluctuation and because of as well the whole cloud thing you know that there are a number of issues so part of the question that we're looking at is how do we make sure that we both we foster choice and competition but also foster a healthy grid and that we are all paying our fair share to make sure that we can can sustain a healthy grid and indeed help that grid to evolve to the next generation so that it can support a greater range of usage and so one of the things that the CPUC adopted in its recent order on that energy metering is a requirement for a study to look at some of the issues involved both with a question of you know are there well the their past studies that show that there are subsidies from non-net and energy metering users to net energy metering users how big are those subsidies and also again what can we do to make sure that everybody is contributing their fair share so that we can have a healthy and sustainable grid. I'm Mitzi Wertheim with the Naval Postgraduate School. I'm into changing behavior and I think as citizens we need to understand the complexity of the problems you are up against. God knows it's complex. I guess my question is does any of your money go into telling the story the stories that you are dealing with in having to do this for the general public so that they can understand something about what's going on out there. I think transparency is important. I urge you all to look at the Allen Alda flame story where they had to explain what is a flame for 11 year olds. I think in these complicated stories you need to explain things for 11 year olds and I also think academics in all of the sciences when they report something they ought to report it also for the 11 year olds so that the nation can learn from them just not their colleagues. Certainly a very good point. I think all of us easily have our focus in state government on the specific challenges and often have the very stakeholders talk to us and the question is you know I know we all spend a lot of time trying to reach out to the general public and certainly you know as again as the scientist on the commission you know one of the questions is how how do we have people understand some of the basic complexities of science as a climate change it's amazing you know the percentage of our population that simply refuse to accept the facts there and so again it's it is always a challenge to take you know the sort of complex technical discussions and convert those into the stories that people can relate to. Storytelling is really important. Oh yes no no. Next question and will the people who are up here will try and get through your questions but I don't think we'll have any time for others. Yeah my name is Tom Faust with Redwood Renewables I come from Marin. As you know July 1 Marin revolted against PG&E and we have our own clean green energy for 30 percent it'll supply everyone 30 percent clean green energy and for I think it's $20 more a month you get 100 percent renewables. Monday this last week the city of Richmond is joint volt decided to to switch from PG&E there's a revolt going in Northern California against the low amount of renewables that the utilities are supplying and and they're and they're growing. I want to point out what happened in Germany. We've got two people behind you could you please get the question. Two weeks ago a country with 82 million people got 30 percent of their energy in two days a week from renewables and on the weekend they got 50 percent of their energy from renewables. The utilities in California are crying wolf fear uncertainly doubt. I'm just saying what's possible. Germany is also shut down nine nuclear reactors and is functioning well and here we're here we're we're quaking our boots shutting down to they have 82 million people their economy is functioning. You know you people are unendated with with lawyers from the from the utility companies that are that are that are just litigating you to death blocking and throttling the system with with with bogus claims. Thanks for the question and we'd like to see how the staff I want to see how how they're going to overcome the the one of the things that the Energy Commission has funded is a study by Kima that compared our distribution system in the German and actually Spanish. We really wanted to build off of the European experience and it does turn out that the European you know the German distribution system is much more robust and is not built as Commissioner Sandoval said our distribution system tends to be built to move power in one direction and so one of the real concerns we have as we increased the the DG on a distribution level is how much backflow there is and what that might mean. Now again but so we're really trying to to learn from the German experience and build that into our thinking. My name is Ben Mehta. I'm XCPRIPG and Energy Commission. My offer to both of you this is a game changing experiment being done in Germany and Canada. It's called power to guess concept where you convert the excess power in whatever into hydrogen which is then stored and transported along with natural gas existing system. It solves a lot of the problems that storage has. It brings clean fuel. It even makes the natural gas greener because of more hydrogen being put into the system. So I'll talk to you both later. Okay. Thank you. Next question. Yes. My name is Robert Ferber from both San Jose State University and Sustainable Silicon Valley. I have a bit more of a domestic question. You spoke earlier about the health of the grid and also about the grid having to change directions. What is California doing with high voltage DC transmission especially as offshore power generating technologies tend to become more of a reality? Well certainly in the offshore we're looking at that as you know our coast tends to drop off pretty substantially so that we're looking more at potentially offshore wind would tend to be more in the Santa Barbara area and obviously there tends to be some visual issues there and we'll see how that develops. But certainly one of the major things like for sunrise is it is a high voltage line and so again we're looking generally as we're going through looking at basically looking at upgrading our transmission system to higher voltage in terms of the DC part, obviously one of the first ones was the intertide of the Northwest is a DC line and certainly looking at some of the longer lines that are being proposed in the West. They would also tend to be DC but again those tend to be more say connecting California to the some of the inland wind areas as opposed to necessarily offshore. So thank you and I'm sorry we said earlier I need to make sure that everyone gets to lunch in the next speaker and we're a little bit over time and I do want to make sure we thank the commissioner and the chair for