I'd like to invite Eder Rock and Cameron Briggs to the stage. Eder was the Director of Climate Resilience at PG&E and she is now the Chief of Staff to Executive Vice President of Engineering, Planning and Strategy, also with PG&E. And Cameron Briggs is General Manager of Future Energy at Origin Energy. Without PG&E and Origin Energy we're founding members of the Beats and Watts Initiative and it is a pleasure to have them here today with us to provide some key perspectives associated with the vision from the members for the work moving forward. So the way we'll be operating is that Eder will show some slides. We'll have first a short intervention from Eder followed by an intervention from Cameron and then we'll open for discussion and questions from the audience as well as potentially some questions from me as we go along. Thank you so much. Whatever you prefer, do you want to come here? Oh, you can see the slides there. I can see the slides? Yeah. Okay. Great. Thank you. And it's a real pleasure to be here today. And I was thinking about your remarks and the remarks that Arun made and something you said sort of stuck out with me and that was from your time working on the IPCC just seeing the progress of climate mitigation and maybe the lack of progress that you're feeling a little pessimistic. And I've been working in the utility space and climate resilience for the last few years and it's hard not to sometimes feel numb to the news. But I will say earlier this week there was just such a shocking piece of news coming from India about the heat wave and the ignition of a number of the landfills and the images of that. You know, I see a lot of images of climate change and what's happening but this was just beyond shocking. And to me, it just re-informed the importance of what we're all doing here today. And it's why PG&E is so proud to be a founding member of Bitton Watson to be here today because we have to show that in California we can solve these challenges and to really show the rest of the world that we can do this. We can decarbonize the grid. We can have an equitable and resilient and clean grid and we can really pave that way for the rest of the world. So things like that are horrible to see but I think they just really reinstill that sense of purpose. So I'm going to dig into what we are doing today at PG&E to really build that climate resilient energy system. I don't have a clicker so should I just... Thank you. Green arrow. Okay. Thank you. So for those of you who aren't from California, PG&E is the largest combined electric and gas utility. We provide energy to nearly 16 million Californians. For the purpose of this presentation I think one of the things we'll focus on is just the sheer size of our service area. It's 70,000 square miles. And so we have a lot of diverse climates a lot of diverse climate impacts and a very diverse population that we are serving. A really important statistic that is not on this slide referencing our runes and marks earlier is that 25% of the population within PG&E service area can be classified as disadvantaged or vulnerable when you think about pollution burden or state medium income. And so that's something that I will talk a little bit more in this presentation but a really important factor when we're thinking about the statistics that make up the service area in PG&E. So as I mentioned earlier, climate-driven hazards are projected to worsen given what's happening with the pace or the lack of the pace of climate mitigation and this is going to have and is already having profound impacts on our environment. And when we think about what that means for us here in California there are a number of really severe climate-driven hazards that we're going to see we will see more an increase in the severity and frequency of heat waves. We all know as a coastal state sea level rise will be an issue. We also have a lot of rivers and the Sacramento Delta is an area of real importance for us when we think about flooding and some of the inland areas. We're very familiar here in California and Australia about wildfire and subsidence given what's happening with the lack of water availability and use of groundwater supplies in the Central Valley we're going to see some real impacts to our infrastructure there. So when we think about this the investor-owned utilities and the California Public Utilities Commission started working together in 2018 to think about how should we collaboratively be thinking about responding and preparing for climate-driven hazards. And the CPSC directed the IOUs including PG&E to undertake a climate vulnerability assessment that includes an assessment of all of our assets, operations and services. And I'll dig into a little bit of the methodology of what we're doing with our vulnerability assessment and some of the findings looking forward. We're taking a pretty typical standard approach to this. We're looking at what the best available climate data that we have from luckily here in California from CalAdapt can tell us about future exposure to climate-driven risks. We're assessing the sensitivity of our assets, operations and service to these risks. Looking at things like design standards, the age of our infrastructure, the condition of our assets. And also looking at adaptive capacity which is essentially looking at how easy is it or not to change. It's pretty easy to replace a distribution transformer. It's really hard to move an entire substation. So we have to take things like that into account. Using these measures we can come up with a general measure of IOU vulnerability. But thinking about what Arun said earlier about the importance of communities and their perspective, because this infrastructure is for them. The CPC has also directed us and this is something we really welcome. We are engaging with all disadvantaged and vulnerable communities in the service territory. We want to understand how they feel about climate change that's happening in their areas and what they're trying to mean about that intersection of our energy infrastructure, other critical infrastructure, climate change and their historic experiences with this. And using this together we can come up with a number of proposed adaptation projects that will be submitted under general rate case filings in future years. So I'll go through two examples of the types of things that we're finding. Looking first at temperature and looking at sort of those 1 in 10 or even more unlikely extreme weather events that we need to prepare for in the future. Using the example of electric substations here in the Bay Area we've been able to pinpoint and using our existing design standards which substations are those that we should be most worried about in 2030, in 2050 and in 2080. And this map to the right shows that we have substations that are going to be exposed to temperatures outside the range that they were designed to safely and reliably operate in. So using the forward-looking data that we have from CalAdapt and then also layering information like load growth forecasts changes that we expect to see in terms of EV load growth and expected increase in air conditioning installs, we can start to identify and upgrade our assets and parts of our grid that are most vulnerable to climate change and prioritize them for investments. Another example that's just a few miles away from here is what's going to be happening in the San Francisco Bay Area related to sea level rise. The picture right here that you can see is the Dunbarton Bridge. I just drove over it last night to get here today. You can see Facebook's campus is a sort of on the upper left part of the map. In the middle of this map is one of our large transmission level substation that serves about 300,000 people in the Menlo Park Palo Alto including us here today. Looking at the projections for sea level rise and thinking about the vulnerability and sensitivity for our assets, we're able to start seeing if we had 100-year storm today, where would we have flooding? You can see that by the red dots which includes this substation that you can see in this picture. Looking out further into the future, we can see the yellow dots are substations that we'll probably want to upgrade further into the future, given expectations for the pace of sea level rise, but we know we have a serious issue in the south bay. Using this information, we can start to do some pretty cool stuff that makes me feel a little less pessimistic and a lot more optimistic about what we can do collaboratively in the future. Last year, PG&E partnered with the city of Menlo Park, the San Francisco Joint Powers Authority and a number of other stakeholders to submit one of the first applications to FEMA's new building resilient infrastructure and communities grant program. We're excited to learn mid-last year that we made it through the round and we're expecting to receive the maximum federal share, which is $50 million in funding. Once this is funded, what we're planning to do is build a nature-based solution, so an eco-tone levee that mimics the natural shoreline that will go around our Ravenswood substation that you saw on that last page, and then we'll also go around Metta's campus and protect a number of the communities in the Belle Haven area of Menlo Park, which is a disadvantaged community. I think what's really exciting about this project and what it portends for us in the bay and throughout California and beyond is just the importance of that public-private partnership. PG&E stepped up and is giving $10 million to this project. Metta is also giving about $8 million and the rest of it is being covered by the federal share. And we can do a lot more together when we collaborate like this and do innovative ways. We could have just said, well, PG&E will just build a concrete seawall around our substation. That wasn't good enough for us. We knew that there was more that we needed to do for the community, so we're really excited about this project and what this means not only for increased resilience and reliability, but also things like restoring the natural wetlands, which will have a climate mitigation impact as well. So I'm really proud of this project. I hope we're going to do more of these in the future, and this is just one cornerstone of the many things that we're doing to make a more climate resilient energy system. Thank you. Thank you so much Heather. And we'll move on to Cameron. Thank you. Can you hear me okay? I work for a large Australian energy company. I'm based here in Palo Alto and I lead the future energy activities for origin based here. I've been with Bits and Watts as everyone was saying before, sort of for five years I think since the very beginning and I can't tell you from a personal perspective and a professional perspective how much the energy system and world has changed in that time. To give you a little bit of a flavour of that I think last year when the full impact of the renewable transformation in Australia came to life we have three big energy companies and I think in the period of five weeks two of the CEOs got fired, ours didn't in terms of the reaction from the markets to what's going on and probably another data point to give you a sense of the urgency of what's happened is just before COVID and unfortunately the message has been a little bit lost. We had terrifying we call them bushfires but wildfires in Australia and in that time one billion animals died in the space of six weeks and that was absolutely catastrophic and that changed the mindset of people. I mean for some people it had been a bit of a distance or a bit of a problem that was kind of a bit unrelated to them and I think since that time the level of public expectation what shareholders expect, what our directors expect has completely changed completely changed so what we've been doing as a company in that time I think probably within the last year have really upended what we're doing and how we're doing it often times companies do initiatives where they I call it the Mars bar you do something and see what happens you do a bit more, you do a bit more we've had to make decisions where there is no coming back we're burning the boats, we're going for it, we're doing stuff and that's transcended every aspect of what we do across our business so from a generation point of view we're massively moving into renewable generation, we've created entirely new businesses where we used to just sell electricity to our large commercial customers they're not interested in buying electricity anymore they want low carbon solutions, they want to change what they do they want to change the way they operate they don't have the experience, they don't have the expertise to do that and with our retail customers again they're wanting to learn things, they want to know what their energy is where it's coming from, how it's being used they want to educate themselves and they want to become part of the solution but I think the really interesting part is when you've got all these different elements of the energy system how do you bring it together how do you bring it together in a way that makes sure you get the maximum efficiency the maximum reliability of what's going to happen and probably the thing that perhaps best explains it to me is 100 years ago when I was a post-doc and I was living in Sweden and the year I was living there and what makes all the aerospace and makes all the military fighter jets came out with a new plane it was a sub plane and what was different about it was that the technical term in aerospace design is called relaxed stability and what that actually means is that you specifically design a plane that is unstable it cannot be flown by people if the plane loses avionics you have to eject that with a parachute but the purpose of that was is if you design something that's inherently unstable for the nerds among us perturbation leads to unstable equilibria and the point of that is that you get the maximum maneuverability the maximum flexibility and the best capability to fly that plane if you actually create an unstable system and if I reflect about what that means from an energy system point of view and you're thinking about how AI is going to change what we do there's a lot of complexity there's a lot of math, there's a lot of expectation but the biggest single test that probably models what we're trying to do as a company and I think the challenge that lies ahead of us is that two months ago we announced we were shutting the largest coal plant in Australia so it's 3 gigawatts almost 3 gigawatts and we're bringing that forward that was 2032 when we're bringing it forward to 2025 which is the minimum notice period you have to give in order to shut a big power station down so the test the ultimate test is in 3 years time when we flick the switch and turn the power station off can we hit the big red button on the trading desk and that big red button is going to instead of controlling one power station with off and on button it's going to control somewhere between 2 and 3 million connected energy assets and have the same net impact to be able to give you that reliability that performance, that tradeability and so over the last 5 years we've gone through a massive transformation inside our company in terms of firstly not the AI, not the ML doing boring stuff just getting data to be reliable, just getting there to be a sense of truth just getting something that we can work with that's the first point and then now building out so every single connected asset we have whether it's large power stations whether it's individual customers whether it's systems EV charges is connected up in a way that has to be controlled by a centralized AI system that's making decisions that's linked into our trading infrastructure so we don't have day ahead markets we don't have capacity markets we are an energy only market and the electricity price in Australia could be a completely deregulated market I believe is the most traded commodity in the world so energy prices fluctuate from minus a thousand dollars a megawatt hour to fifteen thousand dollars a megawatt hour within twenty minutes and it's a completely dynamic market and it changes in real time and a lot of people blow up very quickly if you're not hedged adequately so for us as a trading company the fact that you've got this highly volatile, highly dynamic highly unstable system is something we actually want because that's where we thrive but at the end of the day the only way you're going to be able to solve the energy problem is to have run the energy infrastructure so we're a good way to doing that now I think we've got 200,000 connected devices we've got hundreds and hundreds of megawatts and our goal is to scale up in a time frame that when we switch off the largest power station it's just going to be replicated by distributed assets so for us that gives you a bit of a sense of the challenge and if you think about that transformation it sounds simple, the big red button you hit but underpinning that is a whole bunch of different activities in one time, there's your customers you have to come up with a proposition that says to them if I'm going to give you a battery or a solar system, I'm not going to install it and see it later I want to work with you, I want to understand I want to connect to that asset and give you an exciting proposition that helps you understand what that asset does what its carbon footprint is, how it works and commercially, what are we going to give you if you give us some control over your endpoint asset, what do you get so there's a whole education piece in there there's a whole data infrastructure piece there there's a whole trading piece and it's pulling all those different elements to actually make a coherent highly disaggregated, highly decentralized energy system work in a way that's going to give you the same performance because people will not forgive you if they turn on the lights and nothing happens and even as a good example, one of the biggest things we're doing at the moment is connecting up people's hot water systems because in the old days oh, energy is cheap at night you charge your hot water system up electricity from midnight to 6am or something like that, that's not what you want to do now you want to be soaking up all the excess solar that's happening during the day when you have negative prices so we're doing lots of things like that where we're connecting up hundreds of thousands of hot water systems and there's all these issues that you have to get through when you get to the practicalities of that so first and foremost which we learned earlier in the process, people aren't very happy if they have cold jowls so we've got to get that bit right which is actually by regulation if you don't have hot water systems running for a certain period of time you get Legionnaires disease so there's all these technical commercial, legal constraints you have to understand about all these different assets that you connect up and convert that into something that as an ensemble or as a collection actually starts to look like a large energy power station I'll leave it there but that's kind of the challenge of what we're trying to do the scale and why we think that AI is not just a nice feature, it's going to be critical and central to what you actually have to do Thank you so much Cameron and I'll launch us on a question to both of you on something that you just mentioned Cameron the role of the highly distributed energy generation in particular thinking about the costumer proposition of solar with storage that would be managed separately can you just discuss a little bit or where do you see that going in terms of the composition both for PG&E and in the case of Australia overall of those sorts of systems versus centralized electricity generation moving forward in particular when we think about coupling with storage where the costs are declining but still that combined system is quite expensive to start with so would you care to comment on that? Do you want to go first? Sure So it's very exciting and I think there's really wonderful applications both today in terms of resilience we're thinking about our customers that might get shut off during the public safety power shut off event or we have new technologies installed this summer on our lines where we're going to have an increase in customers and interruptions to their service we need to think about how to provide them service and looking at things like solar and backup battery storage might be a really really good way to start addressing some of those resilience issues in the short term in the longer term when we look at the projections for EV growth in California this is a huge opportunity for us because we view this not as something that we just have to manage we see this as another asset this is another source of generation for our grid and so if we can really improve our vehicle to grid technology and think about the technology that we need to do all of this distributed energy resource management I think there's a huge opportunity for us that will rethink the way that the grid is run and shaped Yeah look I agree I think it's an enormous opportunity I think one of the things that we've tried to do over the last period of time is not have a bunch of old executives telling millennials what they want to do that hasn't proven particularly successful in predicting or engaging with people and so if you kind of talk to a lot of younger people they tend to have different perspectives and different motivations sometimes it's just energy independence I can't stand the energy company I want to switch it off some people are really interested in low carbon solutions some are convenience in Australia I think by per population has the highest PV penetration in the world I think it's like 40-45% of households have solar and so for us the issue of batteries is not so much resilience or reliability I mean I think we've over invested in our grid and it doesn't really break very much what it is is more getting the most out of your solar and it's probably arbitraging between the amount of money you get feeding it back into the grid versus what you do and so for us I think that's becoming pretty economic pretty soon and so for us it's really a matter of trying to listen to the customer embrace what they do and provide enough attractive solutions that makes it exciting and engaging I mean I think when you optimize an energy system there's many levels one is the household level what's happening am I using my solar effectively there's a community level which is what's going on in the broader area and then there's what's going on at a kind of you know entire system level and I think the optimization of that is going to require a different solution for customers different levels for communities it's more efficient to have a battery that's sitting in the network than it is necessarily have every person at home doing that but we just have to be a bit flexible sure thank you so I'll launch one more before opening for questions from everyone but thinking about all the issues that you presented in the context of environmental justice now so 25% of PG&E customers are considered in a group that probably has access to the care rate program which indeed already offers lower rates compared to other segments and more will need to be done as we continue to invest in new infrastructure and adoption of EVs all the implications for that for the rate structure in the future and Cameron you mentioned that the reliance on the energy only system with an enormous volatility that is passed along in terms of potential rate structures for the induced customers so that would be like is it and how that is being addressed so in that context what sort of projects are you pursuing to identify who are those customers both under that will be both under pressure on their utility bills given relative to their income as well as located in places where adaptation and resiliency projects are crucial it's a lot to impact there yeah so we're very aware in California we have a massive energy transition underway and when you look at the state's 2045 carbon neutrality goals we have a lot of work to do on not just the greening of the grid but also the future of the gas system and all these decisions that we make are going to have impacts on rates and so as we think about this transition we have to think about going to decarbonizing in an equitable way because if we have a whole segment of the customer base that goes off grid or decarbonizes you're left with fewer and fewer customers that are paying for the transition costs so it's something that we're actively thinking about in terms of the future of can we green our gas energy supply can we do some new some innovative work looking at how we can decarbonizing pilot decarbonizing part of our grid and removing the gas system and zone electrification that has to go hand in hand with the resilience measures because when you think about it's 25% of the population so it's actually bigger than just the number of customers if you think about the medium household size our disadvantage and vulnerable communities are predominantly in the central valley and some of the urban areas of the bay we already know that these communities are already exposed to the high pollution burden that you've seen anytime you drive down the five in the central valley also heat waves other climate induced vector born illnesses and it's not even just our customers it's our workers it's the agricultural workers all the folks that are going to be outside working in these kind of conditions we have to think about having that reliable resilient source of energy because when we don't have energy and there's no air conditioning that's not just an inconvenience anymore it's a safety issue so as we think about these things about zone electrification and greening the gas supply and reducing pollution burden in these communities it has to go hand in hand how we're thinking about the reliance and the energy system and making sure that we're making those investments so that the ACs can stay on and people can get what they need during these extreme weather events thank you the big change that people have noticed is that as you get more renewable energy into the wholesale market prices come down they don't go up and for most people there's kind of an overall benefit and in fact energy prices are creeping up a bit now in Australia and that's more a consequence of the gas prices as opposed to as opposed to renewables I think just to point about volatile prices we shield our customers from that that's our job as the retailer to do that the energy sector probably faced a bit of a question at the start or as COVID was taking off about what do we do and how do we respond because that had a pretty enormous effect on our customers and I think we took a decision early thankfully our CEO said we're not going to we're going to stick by people this is not going to go on forever and people rightfully will remember how you behave in situations like that and so we took the decision we're not going to turn people off who can't pay because they recognize that the energy industry was probably one of the fortunate ones during COVID because people still need to buy electricity and when you saw the decimation of what happened to people in the services industry and all of that we felt that we were fairly fortunate to be in that position and that people I think will remember good actors in time not just for selfish reasons but that's the way you should behave so I think we try very much to do that and we have vulnerable customers who we have payment programs people who are disadvantaged aren't necessarily I mean energy is a basic service that people are sort of entitled to so I think we try very hard to do I think on mass though that's one of the reasons why if you do bring renewable energy in getting things like AI systems right because that actually drives the cost down the more efficient you can use existing assets the better you can harness those things the lower the prices will be because you don't over build to compensate for the intermittency of renewable generation as well thank you let's open up for questions someone can provide the mic hi Paul Bresla with EDF one of the I guess Cameron what you were talking about in terms of 2-3 million devices is pretty awesome it sounds like quite a challenge and one of the topics that I've dug into a lot over the last few years is has the rubric of transactive energy which could mean everything and nothing at the same time but I know we've chatted before about different systems and different vendors in that space and one of the things that makes me think of is where does the AI lie for that type of system you know is it at the home energy management system is trying to game the system is it at the substation level is the market level how is that put together such that's fair and equitable as that transition happens and it's making it so it's more there's more value for everybody involved I don't know if you guys have any thoughts and also Heather I've chatted with people at PG&E about the same thing and it's a challenge as more and more DERs happen in our community as well I'm trying unpack the question a little bit so where does it sit in terms of value or where does it sit in terms of processing yeah well I think as a starting point the processing is probably done at the at the bigger level the wholesale level I mean that's what we're doing we're replacing wholesale assets with this distributed system but then the processing then probably there's some done essentially some done at the edge because you have to have some intelligence to know what's going on there so things behave in the right way I mean I think the market's going to determine where the value sits I mean it's you can be very theoretical about it but at the end of the day you have to stand in front of a customer and say hey we would like to use your asset are you comfortable with that and there's an education process there's a partnership building process that's going to work one and if you say to someone I'd like to for example you have a large battery in your house we want to pay to use it ten times a year and this is how much we'll pay you and this is the inconvenience and customers as they should will weigh up and say hey am I prepared to suffer this inconvenience for that price and they are or they aren't and that will determine that element and I think it'll probably there's going to be pockets where it's going to be a bit probably inefficient but over time it's going to be quite equitable because competition will just eat away at people who don't do it in a fair manner Jack can you ask the people that are managing the voice level to step it up your conversational tone between like you're just sitting at a small table talking to one another it's not coming across to some people here in the audience because it's so soft and they could if they would turn up the mic a bit it would be much better because some of us including me are losing a lot because of the low conversational tone we can use the handheld if you'd like next level we'll speak up as well Amy, her hold, ExxonMobil we had a Stanford hosted a workshop feels like a few weeks back but it feels like years ago because it's been so busy but just recently on decarbonization and electrification of industry and some of the things we talked about was the renewable penetration goes up and a lot of talk about how to handle residential demand, transportation demand if heavy industry comes in and to really do a lot of electrification that demand profile is going to be very different than the residential and transportation demand. Have you thought about what that mix might look like and how you might prepare for that? I'm happy to take that I'll project so let me know if you can hear me I think we look at the future of the California energy supply with our incumbent electric grid and gas systems I think there's a number of strategies that we're looking at to think about how we're going to meet California's carbon goals and continue that clean, equitable and resilient grid and the first is we see of course transportation as the huge opportunity for us here in California with a huge projection in EVs particularly starting in 2035 and we want to be the the fueler of choice of clean electricity for those cars we look at everything else that's not easily decarbonized by the grid so industry, maritime rail then the question is how can we think about our gas system in a different way so how can we increase the amount of renewable natural gas when investments do we need to make what do we need to do for our existing pipeline infrastructure to make that a viable thing we're looking at hydrogen as a fuel source for industry and I know there was a long topic of this earlier in the week so it's really decarbonize everything we possibly can and green or offer alternatives to existing more carbon intensive fuels where we can I think it's a good answer we're all in a race against time and bits and watts is a transformative venue in which to harness the strength of stanford's accumulated capacity and your immense scale for deployment what do you need as bits and watts members to expand the number of participants in order to scale the impact of this endeavor participants from the perspective of stanford ecosystem or participants in terms of the number of members who joined bits and watts well both for example the smart electric power alliance has say 700 utilities even a fraction of whom could join the front runners in bits and watts with the leadership of the founding members expanding that circle which also expands the problem space in which stanford solutionaries can collaborate so because this is the one panel where the member perspectives are featured I was interested in soliciting your leadership vision on how this initiative expands in order to achieve faster larger impact oh you want me to go first go ahead I've got a bit to say so I think and I've said this to Leong stanford has a unique position in that it is essentially in a world where you've got all these different elements which have to be coordinated to bring together something that's going to happen every single person brings or company or organization brings its own vested perspective I mean in Australia we have there's more electric vehicles in Palo Alto than there are in Australia just because of the way the government hasn't supported it and that's going to change and the number of actors that have to come together to make that work you've got OEMs, you've got network companies, you've got the government you've got retailers, you've got customers everybody's looking at each other going oh you build it and we'll be part of it right it's a coordination problem stanford in itself has the advantage of being independent it's academic and it's independent and I think it needs to take that independence out for a spin and be more controversial be more prepared to take positions to help the industry to make decisions because at the moment every single person out there is doing it from their own vested perspective I can tell you what should happen but everyone's going well of course you're going to say that you're an energy company so one issue is I think it can be prepared to take more aggressive, more independent, more controversial positions in terms of leadership and the second one I think is that if you look at the Venn diagram between what industry wants and what academic institutions can provide it's not everything but there's certain topics where I think they excel I've said this before one is where you have interdisciplinary one is where you have very difficult problems and one where they're not time sensitive because if I go to stanford say I need a problem for this and I'll say good I'm going to put two postdocs and come back in through it I'll just come up with an answer it might be sub-scale it might be not nearly as good but I need an answer tomorrow for certain things so they're not the type of problems but I think if you pick like EV 50 was a good example where here's a problem in two or three years time it's going to be really important to understand the impact of that it's going to rely on having engineering it's going to have data it's going to have policy it's all these different things that can come together and I think stanford has a unique position to bring those elements together to tackle problems and to present them in a way which is digestible, usable and controversial end of soap box that's a tough act to follow I'll just say from perspective here and from PG&E and I'd say any private sector company we need things that are actionable and are usable they're still looking at climate science we've been engaging a lot with all the researchers that are looking at the next California climate assessment because we want to make sure that the data that they're producing is actually stuff we can use when we're thinking about how to look at our assets and our operations and services so random white papers aren't very helpful actually when we can partner together and think about this is the problem we're trying to solve what is the expertise you can bring and what are the problems that we have and work together then it's something that's really value that's what we need we have capital allocation decisions all the time where do you spend money that's going to make the most impact for society for your stakeholders, for your customers, for everybody and getting some sense of where to put that how much and when and having Stanford take positions in that I think would be really useful that I hope that makes sense but that's the type of decisions you have to make absolutely that you just make a decision anyway because you have to get a company but I think integrating into that decision making process would be immensely valuable as Heather said on actionable things and I'll just add this money these are our customers dollars we want to make sure they're both spent and we that one more question I think it's the last one Hello, hi, this is Farnaz I work with Amazon Web Services and my question is more for Cameron so I've read the article about origin shutting down some of the power plants one large one by 2025 and replacing it with a 700 megawatt battery could you speak more about the challenges that origin is facing right now as they retire a lot of these cold plants because a large portion of the power in Australian AMO is still coming from cold so if you could speak a little bit more about the challenges that origin is facing and then how can technology help with the dispatch or the operation of this large grid scale transmission level batteries Sure, I did speak about that in the discussion what we're doing when we shut the power station down and press a button that button is going to be the coordination of large scale batteries more renewable energy and the coordination of millions of distributed energy assets and so yes, we use AWS but we're putting together a large coordinated energy data infrastructure that's capable of independently becoming a market participant making its own decisions about what assets you use how you use them, when you use them so that you effectively emulate what would have been provided by a large centralized power station by a highly decentralized highly decarbonized energy infrastructure so that's the challenge is how do you do that and we're well on the way to doing that but that's really the problem at hand So we have time for one more question and I see that Mark with Hi Mark from Stanford Cameron, I love that you're pushing us it's awesome, right one of the things that we talked about earlier was the accelerator and the idea that Stanford is providing this innovation which is going to be needed for AI you brought up advanced jet fighters at the beginning of your talk when I think of electric utilities I do not think of advanced jet fighters so is there a way and I'm putting a bit back on this on the spot here Stanford is known for innovation utilities need innovation how do we work together to help you embrace that innovation I think at the end of the day our goals are the same right, we want to collectively work to create this clean equitable resilient grid for California and set that example for the rest of the world and to use that innovation we have a whole host of problems right, we're looking at the climate presentation I gave we need better predictive intelligence of which transformers are going to fail under what conditions looking at a whole host of different data points from the condition of the asset to the ambient temperature to the load changes to the customer preferences to how they're using electricity these are models that we have not developed and we need your help to develop them because if we don't develop then in 20 years it's not going to be that grid that we want we need the help, the intellectual firepower of here to think about how do we develop that model what data do we need, what does it look like and I see that as a ripe opportunity for innovation that we can use can operate in adaptable right, so when you talk about the grid and pushing the red button one of the things that really needs to happen is AI at the plant level if you improve combustion efficiency or in your case for transmission in terms of if you can spot what's going on with substations that are going to fail you can make a massive difference in terms of sustainability so that's something to think about how to put AI down at the plant level because right now your operators to plant, no clue so in response to your question I mean, well since in the mood I can give you a Chilean inspirational speech about why you should do it and why it's amazing and why it's all that but the simple truth is what drives people is general fear it's when your industry is changing when you're losing your customers that's what drives fundamental and staggering changes in behavior, I mean we operate a deregulated market we have 25% levels of churn with our retail customers if we don't innovate we lose customers if you operate in a regulated utility you annoy a customer your JD power score goes down there's a lot of elements of structural which is the motivation for doing it I think in terms of the accelerator, again coming back to the point, actionable real deliverable focused outcomes that are solving real problems that benefit from the intellectual horsepower but are tempered by the realities of what's actually happening I think really really striving to make sure that it doesn't become a think tank, it doesn't become a kind of lifestyle project it's really targeted on doing stuff it brings the horsepower, it brings the capital from Stanford to take projects and ideas to a certain point where they're ready to engage with capital markets where they're ready to engage with outside companies because remember most energy companies don't have R&D departments they don't have teams of people who can reach down and understand complex ideas in their formative stages it has to be something they're very good at deploying they're not very good at developing they have to have the commitment to take those ideas to a level to where they're able to be digested and used by industry if you don't do that it just gets stranded so that's what I would say to do if you really are going to do an accelerator that's actually going to make an impact you have to have the courage to take it to a level where it's actually going to be able to be used by the industry so we could keep going with this very interesting panel but we'll conclude with this final message from our two speakers which is that we do need to continue to work on tangible real world problems that actually enable these decisions and with that I don't want to take time away from a long awaited coffee break for everyone so thank you so much and we'll resume in 15 minutes very good


Now we will begin our discussion on longitudinal modes but before we do so we have a question what is the question? So question is how to find out peak power? To find out peak power it is important to realize that what we see here it is the power or energy per pulse it is basically area under the curve. So from there suppose the pulse is triangular it is easier to understand triangles that is why I am saying triangular we will come to Gaussian suppose it is a triangular pulse then your area is half into base into altitude. So from there if you know that we had taken 200 femtosecond to be the width that is the base you can find out what altitude is and here the point to remember is that the base is really very small. So half into base into altitude base is small so altitude will automatically become very large. And now for a more realistic situation where we have a Gaussian kind of distribution there what we will have is we are not going to have half into base into altitude but even Gaussian has a line shape right it is I0 intensity at the maximum position multiplied by a Gaussian distribution e to the power minus x square by 2 or something like that. So from there we will still be able to find out I0 that is how you find peak power and for small pulses and same kind of energy peak power is really, really high. Damage threshold is usually peak power not average power because damage is a result of one to one interaction of light and molecule right. So sometimes what happens is that you know what kind of laser you are using so in that case your peak power is proportional to the average power and proportionality constant is known the system is known then average power may be mentioned. But what you really have to worry about is if your short pulses peak power is the killer if you are worried about damage of your system sometimes damage is good because you might want to do lithography or you might want to do laser cutting or something like that in a favorite example of mine nothing to do with spectroscopy to be honest I do not exactly remember the year most likely sometime in 2003 or 2004 or something like that there was this interesting paper in which somebody had manufactured a bull bull the animal that is rampant in our campus bull a he cow a bull. Now of course being in IIT Bombay one might wonder what is the need of manufacturing bull there God has manufactured plenty and they have provided plenty of problem for us all the time but this bull was special this bull was a nano bull so it would not provide too much of a trouble to you and the way they worked they just wanted to demonstrate there is no reason for making a bull otherwise you cannot even see it unless you put it under a microscope but the way this bull was prepared was that a pulse laser was focused on to this monomer solution and the idea is that the light that you put in it it is going to cause polymerization so wherever the focal point is that is where polymer will be formed and then you move the stage carefully and the polymer bull is formed it is nice very very good nice good looking bull you can read that paper but then the point that I am trying to make here is that it is focused right and you are talking about damage threshold here this is not damage this is the threshold that is required for the reaction to happen and then if you want a very good resolution so here the trick that was played was 800 nanometer light was focused but actually 400 nanometer light was required for polymerization to take place so polymerization took place as a result of 2 photon excitation now 2 photon cross section is actually square of intensity right so it is narrower than the actual pulse that is why better space resolution was obtained by focusing light not of 400 nanometer but of 800 nanometer I do not perhaps we digress a little bit to answer that question but intrinsically they are related something that can destroy can also build if it is used properly right now let us come back to a point of discussion we want to talk about longitudinal modes now you might think what is going on here what is where did this come from we are talking about lasers we talk about pulse lasers we are saying that you packed many photons in all this discussion what is the meaning of longitudinal mode and what is the relevance I cannot say what the relevance is right now you have to wait maybe 15 minutes or 20 minutes to arrive there okay so let us first understand what these modes are as we mentioned in the previous module there is something called transverse mode means specially what does the laser beam look like if you take the laser beam laser spot on a piece of paper do you get a circle do you get a dumbbell do you get something that looks like a d orbital and there depending on the number of nodes along x and y direction you call them time 0 0 time 0 1 time 1 1 so on and so forth modes but right now well they are important we will come to them later right now we want to talk about longitudinal modes longitudinal means modes along the direction of propagation of laser light okay. So now it is important to understand that for a given cavity not all wavelengths are going to be sustained because in order to get a beam where light is going back and forth you must have constructive interference right standing wave has to be generated and condition of standing wave is that the cavity length L this one must contain an integral number of half wavelengths L equal to n lambda by 2 this is very well known I think all of us understand that okay so the point we are trying to make is that you make a laser L is defined you decide already that a particular set of wavelengths can be sustained okay in principle this number of wavelengths is infinite because n can go from what is the smallest value of n cannot be 0 1 n can go from 1 to infinity but then also you have some active medium right which has a spectral bandwidth it is not going to give you 1 to infinity okay. So how many modes are there in the bandwidth that we are using that is something that we will learn first why we are learning all this we will see by the end of this module hopefully. So before going further I want you to calculate this n and the reason why I want you to do this is it is very easy to know thing that okay L equal to n lambda by 2 take an isofi laser since I have used 900 nanometer here I will take that number 900 nanometer is a wavelength that is sustained in isofi laser perhaps that is n equal to 1 so n equal to 2 for n equal to 2 what will be lambda what will lambda be it will be half of that n equal to 3 it will become one third and so on and so forth but that is actually not the case we have as we will see so I we want to dispel that notion that is why we have to once again get a sense of numbers in this business so my question is for lambda equal to 900 nanometer and L equal to 3 meter this is a rough number that I am using here what is the value of n can you calculate yes 6.6 into 10 to the power 6 I have written 6.67 here is 6.66666 6.7 10 to the power 6 that is the first thing to understand we are not dealing with n equal to 1 we are not dealing with n equal to 2 we are not dealing with n equal to 3 we are dealing with n equal to a very very very large number okay if we are dealing with n equal to 1 2 3 we actually have single mode lasers because n equal to 1 and n equal to 2 would differ largely in the wavelength isn't it it will be very easy to cut out one and use another one use an optic optical coupler use use an output coupler that is a dichroic mirror everything other than n equal to 1 or n equal to 2 n equal to 3 would be cut out here however it is important to understand first of all the n value that we use is actually very large okay so if n is equal to this 6.7 into 10 to the power 6 what is the value of n plus 1 7.7 into 10 to the power 6 6.7 into 10 to the power 7 you do not even want to answer that question because it is best to say 6.7 10 to the power 6 in bracket plus 1 otherwise you actually have to write down all those zeros 6 7 0 0 0 0 and then finally 1 0 becomes 1 okay point we are trying to make here is n and n plus 1 okay delta n by n is a very small number delta n is of course 1 when I am talking about n and n plus 1 but delta n by n is a very small number okay how does that matter this is how that matters n into lambda n equal to 2l n plus 1 into lambda n plus 1 is also equal to 2l okay and what we just said is that this n and n plus 1 are practically the same if n is equal to 1 then n plus 1 would be twice n but n equal to 6.7 into 10 to the power 6 that plus 1 is practically equal to 6.7 into 10 to the power 6 if your salary is 1 crore rupees you do not really mind whether 10 rupees are added or subtracted right something like that. So, now what will be delta lambda let us do a rough calculation first lambda into n sorry lambda n minus lambda n plus 1 what will it be it will be a very small number right it is going to be basically 2l divided by n which one will be longer lambda n plus 1 is higher energy right no yes so the difference is going to be not much that is what we understand. So, and that tells us why it is so difficult to make multi mode lasers. So, you have maybe 900 nanometer and 900 and 900.5 nanometer right these are two successive modes how will you separate them ok that is why multi mode lasers usually lasers we have are not multi mode lasers and multi mode lasers are available but they are costly for our purpose this is a blessing in disguise because if you want to do ultrafast spectroscopy you do not want a multi mode laser as we will see ok for now it is important to understand that the difference between the wavelengths of successive modes is really very small right that is best understood if we take this problem of separation in colors of longitudinal modes let me call them colors in terms of not lambda but nu because energy is proportional to lambda right energy is proportional to nu reciprocal with lambda. So, nobody works with delta lambda generally delta nu is better can you tell me what is delta nu when delta nu is nu of n plus 1th mode minus nu of nth mode can you work it out delta lambda equal to nu n plus 1 minus nu n what will it be you have to convert this expression of lambda to nu of course lambda nu equal to c so lambda is c by nu very small is already established I am not asking for that I am asking for an expression I have two answers one is c by 2l another one is more complicated what is the right answer c by 2l right c by 2l delta nu which is the difference in frequencies of two successive modes it turns out to be c by 2l very interesting why is it interesting it is interesting because it is a constant you are working with some laser right l is defined and c is defined anyway unless you change the medium or something so c by 2l is a constant that is the first amusing information that comes out okay delta nu is constant and the only thing that determines what delta how big or small delta nu will be is l right. So, if you want delta nu to be double the value that it is it right now what do you do to the cavity do you increase do you decrease yeah do you make it double do you make it half I want delta nu to become double yeah then l has to become half and I want delta nu to become half that means I want the I want more energetically closer energetically more closer modes then do I need a shorter cavity length or do I need a larger cavity length I need a longer cavity length this is an important issue and this is an important issue for both depending on your requirement do you want more modes do you want less modes as a first control as you see we want more modes if you want an ultrafast pulse so for that you have to increase the cavity length okay where was the first femtosecond pulse produced in India Bangalore is an answer Bangalore no in this case no I gave you a hint I am asking the question now of course it is not our lab it was produced in IIT Bombay it was produced in department of physics professor B. P. Singh's lab he had a CW Ticephile laser so if you go to his lab even now it is there you can see it he made a very strange arrangement he opened up the laser and then he added a vertical inward rod on which he mounted optics that is how he increased the cavity length so you can actually buy Ticephile lasers that will never give you pulse always CW and you find that they are very small our Ticephile laser is first of all big secondly it has folded cavity we are going to open it up and we are going to demonstrate that is because you need a certain cavity length in order to get pulse and then if you want to be a straight cavities simple two mirror cavity then you need a huge space your table is going to be from that to here so it is better to fold it okay by folding is done by using mirrors okay. So C by 12 is a constant for a constant cavity and if you want more modes more modes means smaller separation between modes you want the cavity to be bigger that is the first point what is the second point C by 12 that is a very special number what is C by 12 okay I will make it easier what is 12 by C 12 by C is a round trip time right 12 by C is a round trip time you start you start at this point let us say hit this mirror go back hit this mirror come back that is called a round trip so the total distance travelled by the photon is 2L right and it is a photon so it travels at the speed of light so 12 by C is the time for a photon to do a round trip okay not you or me to do a round trip photon. So C by 12 essentially is a reciprocal of round trip time okay incidental but interesting important. Now I have written in terms of delta nu nu is something that I am not very comfortable with I understand wavelength and wave number better if I want to write delta nu bar what will it be yeah and this is easy question delta nu bar that should not take so much time yeah divide by C what is it 1 by 2L you are hesitant to give the answer because it is so simple but sometimes you get simple answers to difficult questions what is the problem with that so delta nu bar is 1 by 2L okay the only thing that matters is the cavity length now let us once again do a quick bit of math we are working with 900 nanometer let us stick to 900 nanometer can you tell me what is nu bar for 900 nanometer what is the wave number corresponding to 900 nanometer 1 by 900 into 10 to the power 9 10 to the power minus 9 of course okay if I want to do mental arithmetic it is easier to make it 1000 right so 1000 is 10 to the power 3 10 to the power 3 into 10 to the power minus 9 is 10 to the power minus 6 what was that is that right yes reciprocal of that is 10 to the power 6 so that is your nu bar for some nth one nth longitudinal mode what is delta nu bar so nu bar what did we get 10 to the power 6 right 10 to the power 6 what is the unit meter inverse right see once again I was going wrong by a factor of 10 to the power 2 this is my problem so 10 to the power 6 per meter meter inverse and what is a typical cavity length meter 1 meter 2 meter 3 meter does not matter okay we had taken 3 meter earlier is it so let us say 3 meter so what is delta nu bar 1 by 6 per meter is that right if l equal to 3 1 by 12 is 10 to 1 by 12 is 1 by 6 what is 1 by 6 so now you see this is what we are trying to say nu bar for that 900 nanometer light is 10 to the power 6 per meter and nu bar for the next line is 10 to the power 6 plus or if you take on the other side minus 1 by 12 very close okay successive modes are actually very close in energy because we are dealing with high n values we are not dealing with n equal to 1 2 3 are you okay clear and we go ahead alright now we want to know how many longitudinal modes are there why are we doing all this because we are going to see eventually that we want to take these modes and bunch them together to get the pulses okay so you want to know before going there how many longitudinal modes are there to do that let us have all this is from that book whose author's name I cannot pronounce I had shown the book in the during the first module I hope introduction to laser spectroscopy Halina and I cannot pronounce the second name alright here let us consider this this is the laser cavity we have discussed many times here let us say this is the spontaneous emission band intensity versus lambda okay let us say spectral maximum is at lambda 0 and let us say delta lambda is half with that half maximum see what will happen is stimulated emission band is always narrower than spontaneous emission band okay energy density matters is not it energy density of this light is going to be very small energy density of this is maximum so this is sort of like the story of the bull that we are discussing little earlier nano bull okay there also there was sharpening in space because you required a 2 photon cross section here we get a spectral sharpening because of variation of energy density okay so let us say of course this may not be correct for all systems let us consider that this is where onset of stimulated emission takes place okay half with that half maximum of the spontaneous emission band defines the half width of spectral base of this stimulated emission band okay it is not necessary that it is half it can be one third it can be one fourth something but for now let us work with half let us say that this spectral width is delta lambda so what is the base of the spectrum 2 into delta lambda right so once again we are back to the question that we started with but in a different domain that was in time domain this is in wavelength domain okay so now see n multiplied by lambda n equal to 12 fine n plus 1 multiplied by lambda n plus 1 equal to 12 that we know let us say your n max is the mode number so you are giving roll numbers to modes mode number 10 mode number 11 mode number 12 is just that we know it is not 10 11 12 it is 10 to the power 6 plus minus 1 2 3 4 okay so let us say n max is the mode number in this position where will n max be here or here it will be on the lower wavelength side right lower wavelength is higher energy let us say n mean is the mode number for this end of the spectrum okay so we can rewrite these equations then n max multiplied by lambda 0 minus delta lambda should be equal to 12 n max is the mode number here what is lambda lambda is this lambda 0 minus delta lambda so n max multiplied by lambda 0 minus delta lambda in bracket is equal to 12 similarly n mean multiplied by lambda 0 plus delta lambda in bracket is equal to 12 once again okay have you understood what is the total number of modes n max minus n mean well you might want to do n max minus n mean minus 1 okay but then n mean minus 1 n mean are not very different from each other n max minus n mean what is that n max will be equal to 12 divided by lambda 0 minus delta lambda n mean will be 12 divided by lambda 0 plus delta lambda so basically you are subtracting one from the other you will get a denominator of lambda 0 square minus delta lambda square is that right and then you will have lambda 0 plus delta in the numerator you will have lambda 0 plus delta lambda minus lambda 0 minus minus delta lambda so in the numerator lambda 0 will cancel you will be left with yes is this what you have got yeah and what is the denominator lambda 0 square minus delta lambda square but then what we have established so far is that delta lambda is really a small value so you might as well neglect it square for a small value square will be even smaller so what will the denominator be lambda 0 square right so this is my answer 4 L delta lambda by lambda 0 square is this an absolute relation or does it change from case to case see this relationship is obtained with certain considerations first consideration is the onset takes place right at lambda 0 minus delta lambda and lambda 0 plus delta lambda where delta lambda is half with that half maximum that may or may not be corrected can vary it depends on the shape of the spectrum and so on and so forth roughly you get something like this you will definitely get L delta lambda in the numerator you will definitely get lambda 0 square in the denominator that 4 instead of 4 it can be 4.12 or 3.89 it can vary a little bit depending on what kind of spectrum you have and what kind of system you have but roughly this constant multiplied by L delta lambda by lambda 0 square will hold okay now we are in a position to look at this and think what n is going to be will actually work out given some typical values but if L increases n is going to increase okay that may or may not have occurred to us if we did not see it it would not have occurred to me for sure if delta lambda increases and will actually increase I would not have guessed it to be honest and lambda 0 square in the numerator denominator that also would cause n to increase okay if lambda 0 decreases n will increase okay. Now let us work it out for our tie sapphire laser maximum is at 800 nanometer right so lambda 0 is 800 nanometer L okay what is the value of L let us take 4 meter will it help it will help to some extent yes so let us say L equal to 4 meter what is a good value of delta lambda where does lasing start for tie sapphire laser say 700 nanometer let us say 100 on each side okay 200 no 100 right so let us say delta lambda is 100 nanometer can we work out what the number of modes is under that spectrum 4 multiplied by L is 4 meter multiplied by delta lambda is 100 into 10 to the power minus 9 meter divided by divided by is too much what is this divided by what is the denominator 800 nanometer square. So 4 into 4 is good that we will get we will take care of multiplied by 10 to the power 2 square is 10 to the power 4 multiplied by nanometer square right so 10 to the power minus 18 will be there so this 4 is all take care of each other you are left with 10 to the power minus 7 in the numerator and in the denominator it is 10 to the power minus 14 is that right what is the number that is coming how did you get 25 4 L delta lambda by lambda 0 square delta lambda is 100 nanometer so yeah what is your answer because do we get that answer how much 2.5 into 10 to the power 6 large number right so we can expect that for something like titanium sapphire the emission is very high the stimulated emission is very highly multimodal 10 to the power 6 modes are there now let us see what happens in 2 cases one in which these modes are have no phase relationship one in which they have some phase relationship this is what happens here to keep things simple we are not plotting intensity we are plotting the time evolution of electric field so I am showing a large number of waves here okay waves whose frequencies are different from each other just a little so this is a free running laser in which these different modes have no relationship let us say and here this is called a mode lock laser and we will see why it is called a mode lock laser where delta phi equal to constant which means some phase relationship is maintained the easier thing to work out here is at some points let us say at this point phase difference is 0 now what happens you see this kind of a oscillation here and here you see that at this point everything is in phase okay so if this is in phase all the electric fields will add up you will get constructive interference the moment you move x axis is time remember the moment you move out in any direction the waves start getting out of step this is something that we might have studied when we studied time domain spectroscopy right so they start getting out of phase until they have complete destructive interference and then after some time they will start getting back in phase so you are going to get something like these are called interferograms okay so you have packets of energy at regular intervals the interval is shown here we are going to derive this next day but just see what the interval is 3L by C minus L by C what is that 2L by C same 2L by C that we encountered earlier and this is telling us a story what is the story the story is like this suppose you have a shutter in the cavity okay you open it for a very short duration and close it again what will happen in this short duration is that some of these some waves will go through now let us say you somehow manage to ensure that at the time of going through all these waves are in phase okay they come back when they come back to the shutter again you open it what you do then you sustain this mode locked operation rather than free running operation okay so basically bundling together waves that are in phase at that point of time of crossing the shutter and then let them evolve by themselves so that they will go to 0 very quickly and then come back that is how you prepare pulses okay this is only an introduction in the next couple of modules we are going to do the math and then we are going to say how it is actually experimentally done okay that will be our discussion of mode locking if it is not ultrafast then it is perhaps easier to do if you want nanosecond pulses it is done by something called Q switching if it is femtosecond pulses then things become difficult and fortunately as we will see nature provides us a way out by which femtosecond pulses are produced by themselves you only have to put up the system a little bit and the system mode locks itself okay that is what we want to do after this we will we may or may not discuss how to mode lock immediately right away after this but rather after we have developed the concept of how to prepare how to make pulses we want to talk about how to amplify them and then we come to the concept of chopped pulse amplification then we take it from there


I'm going to introduce our next speaker. Pascal, Cheryl. Pascal is from France. Okay, I know I butchered that. I'm not even trying to do the French pronunciation. Pascal has been around in the Mozilla project since the Metscape days as I have. So do you remember that old dinosaur, logo of Mozilla, that's Pascal and I, we're the dinosaurs. And he's, before he worked in tech, little bit in fact, Pascal was a furniture salesman. So take that as you can. Okay, so I think he's ready to go. If you click the thumbnail though, you should be, yeah.  I'll do that. It's so sad to do it on the Mac. Give this one. So that's great full screen mode in Firefox Mac. That's why you don't use that. Okay, so nice to see you. My name is Pascal as he told you. I've been in a project for forever. And I'm working for the release management team on the Nike reboot project. So first maybe a question. How many people use Firefox Nike in the room just that I know? Okay, so that's a third. So I hope that at the end of the talk, like the two third that don't use Nike, we'll try it. So it's Nike for the people that don't have it. That's Firefox with the code that was just checked in. So that was the code from yesterday and often the code from the morning. That's the six weeks of our train model. We have a, we release every six weeks, a new version of Firefox. And first it goes through the 90 stage and then Aurora and then beta and then release. So that's not final work. That's work in progress. They are bugs. It's expected. And that's why we need you. Many experimental features. So the thing that is not so nice is like it's more crashy. It's not as stable. But the nice thing is that you get to experiment all of the new features in Firefox weeks, months, and sometimes even a couple of years before. Some features take a very long time to get in the final release, like multiprocess, for example. So it's awesome. Use it. Why do we need the Firefox 90 users? So basically this is a community talk. We need Firefox 90 users because we need your feedback. We need to know what's broken. We need to know what was working and is no longer working. We need to know which websites are no longer working with Firefox before it reaches the big audience, the hundreds of millions of people. We don't have many 90 users. If we had a lot more 90 users, that would definitely help us. That would help us prioritize work on crashes. That would help us find regressions. That would help us having a better support for macOS and Linux because we have so few users on this early pre-release channels on smaller platforms that it's hard to detect all the bugs before the hit release. So one other reason is very important this year is that we have quantum. You might have heard about it, but we are merging some features from Servo into Gecko. Servo was an experimental rendering engine. It's great. It allows using multiple cores to process CSS. It allows using the GPU. It's much more modern, but it's not for the end user. But there are some parts that are really cool and we want them in Firefox. So currently we are merging this code. Yesterday the Servo repository was put into the Gecko repository as a vendor branch. That means by the end of the year you will have a brand new Firefox with a new engine. That means we're going to break a lot of stuff. So we will need a lot of feedback. A lot of what was working. My website is not working. The CSS is working. This is bad. This is a regression. This is faster. This is not faster. So this is also why we need more nightly users because all of this work is going to happen on nightly. So for many months nobody will know about what the quantum is in real life except nightly users or people that compile it. One very important thing is that I think that nightly is a great vehicle to get our technical community involved. We have a lot of people involved in Mozilla. But I think we didn't get such a great job involving the technical community that we have. There are tens of thousands of people that use nightly. We don't have tens of thousands of people that we put bugs on the daily basis that write patches that talk with the developers and that bring us their ideas. So there is something that has to be fixed there and I really hope that we can grow the size of this community, get the people already using nightly more involved and the people not using nightly involved in Mozilla. So who are they? So usually when I talk to my colleague they tell me, yeah, that's Linux crowd and the people that go to FastDemon. That's not true. Most of our users are on Windows. So we have a bit more Linux users than Mac, yeah. But that's not the majority of the people. The majority of the people that use nightly, they're on Windows. There is a difference with the release channel. We also have a majority of people on Windows except that we have a lot of Windows XP on the release channel and a lot of Windows 10 on the nightly channel. So of course these people are not totally representative of what we have on the release channel. But it's not that far. Who are they? Where are they? What language do they speak? So it's interesting that we have Firefox users all around the world. We don't have Firefox nightly users all around the world. It's only a few countries. 15 countries do like 70% of who use the base and that's mostly the US, Canada, Western Europe, Russia. Russia is a big one and Japan. So that's not great. There's a lot of people that could give us feedback that could tell us their bank is broken in Cambodia and we don't know about it. We know about it when they file bugs when it's based on the release channel. So that's not great. The other interesting thing is that most of the nightly users use the English version. It's not because we are all great at English. Look, you can hear me so I'm not great at English. It's just that for years it was impossible to find the localized versions. People thought they didn't exist. But actually they were there on the FTP. So almost all of our users use the English version except the Russians because they had set up their own download website because we were not doing it at Mozilla. So that's not great either because we also need feedback on the quality of the localization. We need people to use something that the end user in their country is going to use and most of the people they are not going to use the English version. So if there's some text that goes outside of the box that is unreadable, that just doesn't make sense. We don't know because people use the English version. So that's the map of where all nightly users are. Nobody in Africa basically. So South America is not great either. We have really a lot of people in Brazil and that doesn't look great on the map. So that's really something to fix. It's not just countries that have lower internet penetration. People don't have access to computers. Now we have very low numbers, very low nightly numbers in countries where there is general education, there is good internet access and we have lots of Firefox users. So we miss something. There is something that is not, it doesn't feel right. So eight months ago I started the nightly reboot status as part of the release management team to see what could we do. What could we do to get like more nightly users? What could we do to get them like more involved, to get more information on crashes, to give you an idea. We have so few crashes on the nightly channel that we don't know if a crash is going to become explosive on the release channel or not. So when we have to prioritize work between true crashes, we don't have the volume to tell us, oh, that looks, that looks like it's going to be a lot of crashes on the release channel or maybe it's going to be 15 crashes on the release channel because some guy is using Firefox on a poor PC and a RISCOS platform and that's nobody. We don't have the volume to make the informed decision to prioritize the work for developers. So as I told you, that was not a big focus of Mozilla. I think we always took for granted that we had a nightly community that was providing feedback and we didn't see the gem that was in this community. So there was a lot of things to improve. So we did a lot of things in the last eight months. First, we have download pages. That's amazing. You can download nightly. Believe me, it was complicated. For a very long time, the localized version were only on the FTP. So people thought they didn't exist. There was a separate download site that had been set up in 2011 by the web dev team and nobody was really updating it. Like, all templates, it was not localized, we had no metrics. It wasn't great. And it was not part of our main download site. So people really had to Google it. They had to find it. And of course, there was no issue optimization. So it was actually even hard to find if you were looking for it. So now we have all of our builds on Mozilla.org. That means we change some infrastructure that we use to ship Firefox to have nightly has a real channel. There is information in our tools that tell us the nightly version is this one. And we have this local, this local, this local. So that was a lot of work and that pays. Like, 15 days after we put it up on Mozilla.org, we had like 15 languages that had translated the download page. So now nightly is also on the pre-release page. We have a pre-release page that talks about the dev edition beta. It wasn't talking about nightly. A nightly is all, I mean, it's all main pre-release channel, the one that gives us the best feedback because when people report a bug for a regression that happened like yesterday or three days ago, it's very easy to back it up, to back it out. If it's like six weeks, 12 weeks, 18 weeks later, it can be like more tricky, like just finding the regression range. And sometimes, mechanically, you cannot back it out because the code has changed too much around. So it's very important for us to get this feedback very early. And it's great that we have download pages. We changed the default bookmarks. Like, the default bookmarks for nightly were the same as the release channel. So they were telling you, do you know what Mozilla is? Or are you looking for add-ons? I think the people that went to the FTP site to download nightly, they can find add-ons. And that was really the same bookmarks for the general public for everybody. They make sense for the general public. They don't make sense for people that are very technical savvy. So now there are links that lead to contribution. They go to our IOC channel. We created an IOC channel for nightly. We opened a blog. So go to a blog, visit Planet Mozilla, get involved. We have the same get-involved link, but instead of going to a general purpose, get involved in Mozilla, spread stickers and so on, which is useful. It's more like, yeah, write batches, file bugs. That's super useful. That helps us. That's the... We don't want to change the people that use nightly. The people that use nightly, they are tech savvy. That's great for us. It doesn't mean that they're computer scientists, but that means that when they open a bug, it's actionable. We can do something about it. We can have a conversation with the developer that is going to fix the bug, and the people, they understand each other. It's not just like, it's broken. So it's very important for us. We have a blog. I mentioned it. We have nightly users. The problem with nightly is that it's not a release, or actually it's a release every day. So you don't get like release notes. Even though nightly users, they didn't know what was new, because if some new feature is in a menu, or if it's a contextual menu, or if it's not obvious, or if it's an option, you're probably going to miss it and think nothing is happening if it's not user-facing. But there's a lot of cool stuff that is happening that is not user-facing. So we opened a blog last summer, and we are inviting everybody to write to this blog. That means volunteers as well, not just monthly employees. If somebody is organizing an event to promote nightly in Vietnam, that would be great to have a post about it. There was a guy who wrote an article on how to install Firefox Nightly and get it integrated with Ubuntu Unity. That's a great article. And you get developers that tell us, I'm working on this feature. It landed yesterday. Give us feedback. Or you have developers that make a recap. This week in Firefox, this, this, this, this new feature, this was fixed and so on. So that's external communication. Because we have to fix all of the communication around nightly, external and internal. The Twitter account is super active now. We have just reached 10,000 followers. People eight months ago, when I took over the Twitter accounts, they were sending angry messages. My Firefox is not working. What are you doing? And so on. And now, they really interact like they tell us, oh, I think this is broken because of this bug. Can you look at this because I think it was working before or not now? So it's a very positive interaction now and very useful. So that's external communication. But we have, like, we have set up great internal communication in Firefox. We have this page about home with snippets, promotional snippets at the bottom. And we never used it for nightly. Of course, we're not going to tell people to go to maybe they're not the right road. But if I tell them, we have this problem on the Mac and you're happy to have the same configuration. And could you have a look at this bug? Or if I tell them like here, we have a new menu in Firefox Nike to report a broken site. Learn about it in this article. That brings the value to the user. It discovers new features. That also brings, so that improves retention. Like, people know that there's something cool. They discover it and they keep using it. That also helps, like, growing the community. In the French version of Firefox. So this is on the English version. This is on the Spanish one. So on this one, you see that's a link to an article about quantum. That's the Spanish community. Mozilla's panel has translated. And this is the French one, which is talking about the news that is going to happen in Mozilla, Paris, in April for localizers. So we can promote events like you can imagine that somebody that is using Firefox Nike in French or in Russian instead of English, there's probably something that is very interested in Mozilla and they are also interested in their own language. Otherwise, they would be using the English version. So maybe they could join your localization team. Maybe they would be interested. So that there is a way to interact with your users and not just with your potential users. And the What's New page. So since nobody was really taking care of Nike, the What's New page had been deactivated. That's the page that appears every time you change your cycle. Like, when you go from 953 to 54, the day changes, like the day your version number changes, you have this page that gets displaced. That's a very easy thing to set up. And now we have established a communication channel with our users. We are not like spanning them every day with the What's New page.  You can get involved in Mozilla. Here you can find more information, but more like targeted at more technical people. Like going to site, like, what can I do for Mozilla? So I'm a C++ person. I could do that. I'm a Java person. I could do that, et cetera. Instead of getting people involved in things, we are already good at. We are good at organizing events everywhere in the world. That's all for the general public. We don't need the help of Nike users for that. So the things that we did in the last month was fixing the download process problem, fixing external communication, but also fixing internal communication. So this is the most important for you, for the two-thirds of the room that don't use Nike. So what could you do to help? Promote Nike. So I'm promoting it in French. I'm promoting it in English. I'm trying to promote it in Spanish. And that's the extent of my languages. So if you speak another languages than I do, then the three I have mentioned, please promote Nike. We have a blog. Maybe you can translate the interesting blog articles. We have events. Maybe you could organize events in your region focused on testing, back-to-reaching, attracting a more technical crowd, people that will be able to find a regression range and say that this patch caused this bug. That would be really cool. Make some buzz around it. And do you have a patch in Nike? So that's mostly for the people that are already involved in Mozilla, like employees, but also volunteers that have patches in Nike. Talk about it on the Mozilla blog. If you do something interesting related to Nike, I will be very happy to promote your work, to promote it through the tools that we have, the external ones that I mentioned, the blog and Twitter, but also the internal ones. We can put it on about home, which is viewed by a lot of users. We can put it on what's new page for your language. We don't have to have the same what's new page per language. We can have different information. Sorry, that was the last slide. And then use Nike as your main browser. If you use it on the side, it's great. That's cool. Nike has telemetry activated by default that sends useful information to developers, send your crashes. But if you can, please use it as your main browser, not your secondary browser. Try to connect to your bank. Try to use all of your websites. And tell us if it's broken. If a website is broken, like a banking site, it's very important to know. Three hash bugs. That's also a very important thing to do. We get an influx of lots of bugs every day. And there are not enough employees to react to all the bugs that go to bugs in Amazon. And then help people not comfortable with English reporting. Reporting bugs. That's what the French and Japanese communities do. People find bugs, but they are not comfortable finding bugs in English. Yeah, my time is up, I think. So help them. I forgot to say that I'm very talkative. Okay, that's the last slide. So the grand idea is to improve the quality from the start, like improve the quality of Firefox. If we can improve the quality of Firefox significantly, maybe we could do that. Like, only lightly beat our release. And ship faster and better software. So that's the idea. Yes, Geoff? Firstly, why would we really want to do that? What difference does A-breeds make given that we're used to ship every year and a half? And we thought, you know, we want to ship faster. And we are shipping faster. But now. And secondly, have we looked at automated browsing? Because it seems like you're saying, hey, everybody, run a browser that crushes more. Because then you can tell us all about the crushes, and you lose all of your work.  If we had a whole bunch of machines that were just surfing the web, and they were also producing crashes, you could say, well, we want some help with that. But if the machines aren't doing it, and you're asking us to do it, that seems a little... So several questions. So why are we doing it? The ORA cycle is useful, but it's not giving us the feedback that it should. We don't have a lot of people on this channel. And most of the people that are on this channel used to be 90 users. So basically, we get the back reports, but six to eight weeks later. So that's not great. Also, it's promoted as a web dev tool now. And we get a lot of reports for the dev tools, but not for the rest of Firefox. So it's still useful. It's a stabilization step. But it's not as usual as we hoped it would be. So it's not that great. The second thing is that we have a lot of people that want to shift faster internally in Mozilla. And it's true that some things, like changing the size of a button in the UI, it could shift faster. So currently, what we do is that we uplift a lot of things to ORA. So that's work for the release management team to uplift lots and lots and lots of patches to ORA and beta to go faster. But basically, this could shift faster. So that was why this channel is not that interesting. If we improve the quality on nightly, we don't really need the ORA channel. The other thing is that we don't have a lot of people on nightly. And since a lot moved to the ORA channel, we don't catch the crashes on nightly. That means that ORA is not stable. It's not as stable as you think you are. It is. It's because we didn't catch the crashes that we used to catch before. So if we grow the community on the nightly channel, we don't catch them on the ORA. So it's faster. Then you talked about automation. A lot of the crashes that we have, they are specific to the configuration of the people. Graphic cards, antivirus, add-ons, tons of things like the metric is gigantic. So everything that we know, we test automatically. But what we don't know, we cannot have tests for. That's what we are looking for. And now we have just landed the electrolysis. And electrolysis multi-processes is on nightly now. And we have quantum coming. That's a lot of ground work, like important changes, like hundreds of thousands of lines of code that's all going to land. And we will need this feedback very, very, very early. Does it answer your question? Cool. I will be available most of the time at the booth, at the Mozilla booth in a building case. So don't hesitate to talk to me in French, Spanish, English. I always do, yeah. I'm going to do the intro on this and then I'll turn it off. Everybody squeeze in, squeeze in to the middle, especially on that side. To do what? The camera. So we're going to get started. We're already five minutes over. No quick things. Please use all the empty seats that you can in the middle, squeeze in, make room at the edges. We're going to have more people coming in, just to cause as little disruption as possible. Plenty of room at the back. Don't stand in the aisles if possible. If you're new to the room, we have a room code of conduct. Check it out. As I said, it's unique to this room, separate from the follow-up code of conduct. So have a quick look, if you can, please. I'm going to introduce our next speaker, Alex Lakatos. His friend's calling Laker, but for some reason he's not fond of that. He's a JavaScript developer by dairy and a mausoleum by night. He wears many hats. He's a reps council member and he's a tech speaker. Little in fact, in his misguided youth, he got a Casino dealer license. So over to you, Alex. Take it away. He's absolutely nice, right? And I'm going to take a seat because I'm not as young as I like to think. I want to talk to you about fact of that thought and some tips and tricks that I use in my daily life and sometimes in my nightly life. So I love developers. Yes, yes. Okay, good. So most of you. If you have any questions, I'm going to be outside after this. I'm going to try to make it on time though. So let's get started. How would you open developer tools?  I'm shamelessly plugging my dog here, even though it has only one article. So how would you use the developer tools? Most people go right click and then there's inspect element in here somewhere. That opens up like just the inspector on the element you clicked. There's another way you can go to tools web developer and then pick your tool from there. Let's start with web console. Good. So I'm setting the web console just because this was the first and I always go there. But I want to show you inspector first. The whole idea behind it is my dog is buggy and I kind of want to fix my button here. I want to do that. I have to select my button. It's kind of not really sure which one is my button. There's more elements. But I have this little search field here that helps me help these CSS electors and I'm using material so I know this is going to be an MDL button. If I try to search for it, it's going to show me a page has like four different buttons on it. So I'm going to cycle through them until I get the one I want. Okay. So now I have my, I have my button on screen size. So I can see my CSS for my bottom right here. It's not the color I want it to be. So I'm going to try to look in here for colors basically. Now there's a lot of CSS, right? So I don't know which one of them is the one I'm looking for. But trying to find the instance of color is going to take me some time. But I have this filter in here and they can just say