Good afternoon, everybody. We're going to get started. There's still a few more people coming in. For those of you who need a seat, there's a couple seats in the back. It's a bit of a tight squeeze, but it's going to be better than standing the whole time. And I think there might even be a couple more around. But this is a great crowd. This is a great testament to how popular this resource is. I'm Dan Berset with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Welcome to our briefing today. We're hosted today in coordination with the House and Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucuses. And we're cosponsored today by the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. And special thanks to the House Science Committee for helping us get this great room, where we'll hear from a really excellent panel of industry experts in just a moment. We have a very packed agenda today and a lot of material to cover. So I'm going to make this very quick, but I have three things. First, a plug from my team, EESI. If you're new to EESI, perhaps this is your first briefing. I encourage you to visit us online at EESI.org. We have a full slate of briefings on a wide range of climate and clean energy topics over the next few weeks, and even more that are yet to be announced. The best way to stay informed is to take a minute to sign up for our Climate Change Solutions newsletter so our briefing schedule, legislation tracker, fact sheets, and articles are all delivered right to your inbox. Second, a little interactivity. If you can manage to hold your sandwich and do this at the same time, show of hands. How many folks in the room have used or read a previous version of the Sustainable Energy Factbook? All right, lots of Facebook rookies in the audience today. Well, good news, you have picked a great time to be introduced to this tremendous resource. This year's edition, the eighth published so far in partnership between BCSE and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, is the best yet. There is simply no comparable compendium of facts and analysis of climate and clean energy indicators out there. It's the best. You'll hear from these industry experts about some of the highlights and some of the most interesting findings. But take some time after today's briefing to read through the full resource. BCSE and BNF analysts have once again produced an extraordinary, easy to use document that I predict you will find indispensable. And lastly, as you listen to our speakers and panelists today, you'll hear a lot about the decade of clean energy or, for those of you, hashtag a clean energy decade. And there's a whole bunch of other Twitter hashtags you can use while you're here today. And that's great. Consider for a moment how much we've accomplished over the last 10 years, how total US greenhouse gas emissions have fallen, how investments in renewable energy have soared, how the US energy mix have been completely transformed by technology and new resources, how new professions and trades have been developed, and how much of our lives have improved. But more than that, you're about to hear some of the most compelling evidence that we can, if we set our minds to it, if we prioritize efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we can do even more and meet the challenge of climate change on our terms of economic growth and prosperity. And now it is my privilege to introduce Lisa Jacobson, President of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. Under Lisa's leadership, BCSE represents the energy efficiency, renewable energy, and natural gas industries. BCSE is actively engaged across the full spectrum of sustainable energy, energy policy, tax issues, international climate negotiations, and emerging technologies. Lisa, thanks for the opportunity to once again help present the fact book and help it find its way to the policymakers and the staff who need it as Congress turns their attention to climate and clean energy issues. Thank you, Dan. Thanks. Thank you, Dan. And it is my pleasure, on behalf of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, to congratulate you in your new position as the head of EESI. Really looking forward to continuing the collaboration that the Business Council for Sustainable Energy has had with EESI. And this event is just one example of it. It really is a high point of the year for the Business Council for Sustainable Energy to partner with EESI and the House and Senate caucuses to present the sustainable energy in America fact book findings to you. As Dan said, we have an excellent discussion today. We also hope to have plenty of time for questions from the audience. We'll start with an overview presentation of the 2019 and year on year trends, as well as a look back on the 2010s in what we're calling the decade of sustainable energy by Ethan Zindler, head of Americas for Bloomberg NEF. And then we're going to have an industry panel to share their reflections and insights on the data. But just to give you a little bit more background on the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, as Dan said, we work with the broad set of industries that have transformed the US energy marketplace. Our core focus has been on demand side and supply side energy efficiency, natural gas, and the broad portfolio of renewable energy technologies. But our marketplace is an integrated and innovative one, and new technologies are coming in and helping us achieve our pressing economic, energy, and environmental goals. So when you look at the fact book, and I have a copy of it here, which I'll share with you, it is a compendium of what we think are the most pertinent energy facts, and it spans the power sector, buildings, industry, transportation, and showcases technologies that may be relatively small now, but are primed to be on the rise. Things like energy storage, applications like microgrids, technologies like hydrogen, and new forms of renewable thermal, like renewable natural gas. So I encourage you to take a look at it. It's available for free on the BCSE website, www.bcse.org fact book. And then also on our website, you'll find a lot of really interesting tools, many graphics, videos, small compendiums of the data, so you can get to a technology that you might be interested in, or kind of a subset of facts. We have a whole slide deck on infrastructure, and a look at what's going on at the States. So I encourage you to dive in, and we welcome your feedback on what we think is a really important product for policymakers, because at the end of the day, things have been changing very fast, and we need a foundation of facts for the forward-looking policy conversations that we're having. So, again, I wanna thank EESI for making this event possible, and I wanna thank Ethan, Zindler, and his team, the BCSEs team, and our excellent and distinguished panelists today. So with that, it's my pleasure to introduce Ethan Zindler, head of the Americas for Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Thanks Lisa, can I move your placard? Yes, you may. And I'll put mine up, I guess, you know who I am. So I'm Ethan Zindler with Bloomberg NEF, that's actually our official name these days, is Bloomberg NEF, and it's a real pleasure to be back here again, and I think we've been here a few times to do this briefing, and each year brings a new harvest of facts, and this year is no different. I would say the one thing that was rather convenient is that we came to the end of a decade for this year's fact book. Again, it's the eighth time that we've done it, but this time we were able to look a little more broadly. I'll definitely talk a bit about 2019 today, but I'm gonna mostly talk about the level of change that we saw over the prior 10 years, and that change has been really pretty remarkable. When I first started working in clean energy about 15 years ago, everyone said, well energy's really interesting, but it takes a long time for anything to change. You gotta think more in decades. But actually what we've seen is that things can change very, very quickly when you introduce new technologies, policies, and investment, and the rate at which things have been transforming over the last decade or so, and my mind has been really rather remarkable. Again, I'm gonna talk a little bit about the high level findings. There's, I think, 130 total slides and lots of fun text in there and lots of all kinds of facts, but I'll try and touch on some of the main points, and then we have a great panel who are gonna offer their comments, and then happy to take questions as we go. So hopefully this will now work. Am I pressing the right button, Lisa? There we go. Okay, so first, from the most macro basis, looking at the U.S. economy, we were very privileged in the U.S. that our economy has been getting more productive in how it uses energy overall. So this is just an indexed look at GDP or our economy, essentially since 1990, that's the green line, and the purple line is the amount of primary energy consumption that we use, indexed. And you can see very simply that the economy has been growing, but energy consumption has basically been staying mostly flat, particularly over the last 10 years, where the GDP grew by about a quarter, but our energy use only grew by about 6%. And each of the 10 years of the last decade, we saw economic growth in the U.S., not frankly, spectacular economic growth, but every year the economy did grow, and in five of those 10 years, the amount of energy that we used actually declined. And what this means is that our energy productivity, and this is sort of an informal calculation that we do, which is simply dividing the blue line by the purple line, the rate of energy productivity in the U.S., generally speaking, has been rising year on year. Part of this is a reflection of the fact that the U.S. traditionally has been an incredibly profligate user of energy. Per capita, we use a lot of energy in the United States. So there's all kinds of opportunities for energy efficiency improvements, plenty of room for improvement. And of course, a huge part of it also has been the actual efforts that people have made from the most basic stuff, from replacing light bulbs to much more technical and high-tech stuff like using digital technologies to understand the flow of electrons or improve operations across a wide range of industries in the U.S., but overall, it's an improving picture in that regard. Just to break it down a little bit more on a total energy consumption basis, and by the way, these are not proprietary BNF stats, these are stats that you can get from the EIA, but you can see that overall, as again, the top line has remained relatively flat in terms of total energy consumption. I'll dig into the layers in just a minute, actually, in the next slide. On the right-hand side, you can see that the rate of electricity demand fluctuates up and down in terms of growth rates. Some years it actually drops, other years it goes up, last year it dropped, but it's all over the place from minus 4% to plus 4%, but the general trend, which is the dotted line, has been down in terms of our electricity demand. Now, talking about the makeup of our power generation mix, again, EIA data here, with us just annualizing the last couple months of 2019, most importantly, a lot more, not most importantly, but a number of takeaways from this, as you go layer by layer through it from the top to the bottom, the light blue shows renewables, and you can see that the amount of renewables that we have online in the United States in terms of their contribution to total consumption rose from about 10% to about 18% over the decade. Pretty remarkable stuff as sub-numbers within that. We have about three times as much wind capacity online as we did a decade ago. We have about 80 times as much photovoltaic capacity online today as we did 10 years ago, and it's still a relatively small percentage of total generation. Natural gas grew to about 38% of total generation last year, nuclear held steady through most of it, despite the closure of some nuclear plants at about 20%, and you can see that the biggest loser, frankly, has been coal, with about half of its generation level shaved off over the last 10 years as about 200 gigawatts of coal plants have closed, and we anticipate more to come. This is just a look at it on a raw basis, and you can see in terms of terawatt hours, and once again, the top line is relatively flat as there hasn't been a lot of growth in actual demand for electricity. Always worth noting that we think about the US, of course, as one giant market, but actually what it is is about a dozen, and this isn't all of them, but about a dozen individual power markets around the country, some of which are extremely regulated, some which are fairly liberalized, and there are very differing sizes, PJM, which is the one that we're in here is the Mid-Atlantic States and others. That's the one you see in the middle, and you can see the progress, the differing rates of progress by market in terms of how these different technologies have come online. No really clear story individually, but different regions have different strengths. Obviously the Northwest has a lot of hydro, and that's why you see a lot of blue bars up there. Southeast has a good volume of nuclear, along with PGM, those are the red bars, but these regions are very different. They have very different dynamics that define them, but there are some macro trends that I'll continue to talk about that apply to all of them. If we look at what's gotten built in the last 10 years, first the black bars at the bottom, you can see there's basically been no coal brought online since the beginning of the last decade, the last 2011, 2012. There's a lot of talk about wanting to revitalize the coal industry in the United States. The bottom line is it's awfully hard to build a new coal plant even if you want to right now, because you will not most likely get it financed in the US, because it's very hard for those plants to actually make money. Also a lot of the banks are under pressure not to finance coal generally speaking. If you look at the rest of what's been built over the last decade though, those blue and gray bars are renewables and gas, and you can see that that is the large majority of the total capacity that's been built. Last year we built about 20 new gigawatts of wind and solar capacity in the United States. It was not a record year for the amount that we actually brought online. It was a record year for the amount of new capital though that was invested in the sector with over $50 billion in new money going into renewables. And that suggests actually that this year we're gonna have a record year for wind and solar build because often the money foreshadows when things actually get completed. So this is going to be a very strong year for clean energy build. One trend that I know we're gonna talk a little bit more about when we get to the panel is corporate renewable energy procurement. And I find this a really interesting trend. Last year we saw another record with about 13 and a half gigawatts of new contracts signed between corporations and providers of clean energy. So this is, for instance, Google or AT&T or Facebook signing contracts to have their operations powered by either a nearby wind or solar project or through some kind of synthetic arrangement where essentially they're buying the electrons from a clean energy project that's not literally next door to it but which essentially is serving it indirectly. This activity has been going up year on year. It's part of the large number of corporate commitments. There's over 200 companies in the world now that have committed to the RE 100 which is to go 100% clean energy. And as I mentioned earlier, we saw 20 gigawatts or so of new renewable capacity actually built in the United States. 13.6 gigawatts of contracts signed last year. These are not exactly apples to apples but just to give you a sense as to how important these contracts are to the overall number of how much is getting built. And if you look at that list on the right, obviously the tech companies are well represented. What's a little further down, not on this list, is we've actually seen oil companies signing corporate power purchase agreements as well, in part because some of them are making commitments to reduce their so-called scope one emissions. Those are the emissions associated with getting oil or gas out of the ground. Google has continued to be a leader and one of the challenges that they have is that actually they are starting to meet 100% of their needs through clean energy already but they keep building server farms and they need more and more contracts to meet their new needs for electricity. Coal. We hear a lot about the potential for revitalizing the coal sector in the US from this administration. And I think it's worth noting, maybe I'll try and dwell a little bit more on the right hand slide when without getting into too much detail in the interest of time, let's just say that last year at the end of the year, if you looked at how much coal was going to be retired by 2025, there was an announcement of about 25 gigawatts of additional coal capacity that had told the EIA that they were gonna come offline by 2025. We're here a year later and that number is now about 30 gigawatts. So the number of coal retirements and planned retirements for coal is not going down despite a lot of regulatory and other efforts from the administration, if anything, it continues to go up. And the main reason for that really is the pressure that these plants are facing from competition from cheap natural gas and renewables. They simply can't compete on price for the most part. It is not, I would note for the most part, a regulatory story anymore. Okay, so in terms of emissions, let me just do a quick time check here. In terms of emissions, the US made real progress in the last decade, but long story short, not enough. So since 2005, the US has cut its emissions by about 12%. That's that purple line that you see on top. The promise of the Paris Agreement that the US made under the Obama administration was that we were going to get to somewhere about twice that, about 25% by 2025. So if we're at 12% now, that means we need to do a lot of work over the next five years. And it's frankly hard for me to see how we get there, but we can talk a little bit more maybe in the panel about possible paths, but it would require an acceleration substantially. It should be noted though that if you look sort of, but underneath the hood at the different segments that go into total US emissions, that the power sector is for a couple of years now has no longer been the number one sort of culprit of CO2 emissions. It dropped below the transportation sector, which you may have trouble seeing, but that's the yellow line on the right hand side a couple of years ago. Last year emissions from the power sector just in one year alone dropped by about seven and a half percent, which is a really remarkable achievement if you think about it. And again, it's the combination of coal coming offline of plentiful production from gas and renewables and actually also because our total consumption of electricity last year did not go up. So no longer is power at the top of the list. And in fact, the industrial sector I would argue is something that we also need to keep an eye on as we think about CO2 emissions. Where does this leave the US in terms of competitiveness? And I always like to try and make this point fairly, hopefully fairly emphatically within the context of policymakers. Often I hear the conversation around, okay, so how do we deal with the climate crisis? How do we look at what's going forward? And it's always framed as a, oh gosh, it's a kind of eat your broccoli kind of conversation. Like this is gonna be so painful and boy, how hard is this gonna be? Look, the US has extremely competitive energy prices and has had them for the last decade. We have been rapidly decarbonizing our power sector and we have been keeping our power prices quite low. So this is just a look at the G7 nations and wholesale power prices and you can see that the US is near the bottom of the list in terms of that price and you can see how steady that that has maintained. And if you look at wholesale power prices across a number of markets in the US, in fact, what you'll hear a lot of complaints from people in my industry is that the prices are so low that some of them can't make money right now. But that's a separate issue. The consumers are benefiting from this trend. And so when people say, oh my gosh, this is gonna cost so much to decarbonize, I say, hey, wait a second, let's take a look at the last 10 years, we've been decarbonizing and we've been saving money in the process. So I do hope that as these conversations go forward about decarbonization, about clean energy, we recognize that there is cost savings potential. And if you look at that down at the consumer level, total energy expenditures on the left-hand side that household, the amount of money that a household spends every month on all their forms of energy as a percentage of all their expenditures, you know, Netflix, et cetera, it's about 4%. And you can see how much that that line has come down since 1960. Again, if you break it by electricity and natural gas costs, that's the same general trend overall. So the consumers are the ones who are benefiting ultimately right now from all this transition that we've seen. And of course, underlying that partially is the fact that renewable prices have been coming down. This is something that we at Bloomberg and EF track pretty carefully, which is the actual levelized costs of energy of different technologies. You can see just without going in great detail, but basically particularly for utility scale and residential solar, the yellow lines, you can see how much the costs have come down in the last decade. There are a lot of reasons around this. Certainly there's been energy, certainly been innovation of the technology, more productive, affordable tech modules. But I would also argue that primarily the biggest reason is that we've just scaled up the industry and thanks to China deciding that they wanna be a major manufacturer in the sector, the costs of modules have gone down dramatically. Battery prices have also gone down. In fact, one of the things that we do is look at the costs of battery prices, battery pack prices just from 2010 to 2018, those battery prices have dropped by about 85%. And yes, there's new technologies, but largely what we're talking about is a scale up of manufacturing in China and other parts of the world and of course the Gigafactory out in Nevada as well. Coming back to the power generation technologies would try not to go into great detail here, but one of the things that we do semi-annually at Bloomberg and EF is just literally look at the cost comparisons of different technologies on a levelized cost basis. Without getting into great, great detail on what levelized cost means, basically it means, hey, if I owned this wind project and I wanted to sell the power from that project and I wanted to pay off my debt and make a reasonable rate of return of let's say 10% return on equity, how much would I have to sell the juice for? And the answer in our view is somewhere between 26 and about $60 for wind, that's on the far left-hand side, and you can see the other technologies moving across. And the main takeaway of course is that you see renewables really at the lower end of the spectrum now. There's a range for all these technologies, obviously if you build a solar project in the Southwest US, there's more sun, you get more productivity out of the project, it can be more profitable potentially. You do it in the Northeast, you might not have as much sun, but you might be able to sell the power for a higher price because electricity prices are higher up there. It's very different depending where you are, what part of the world. Just for a moment, talk about transportation. Last year actually wasn't a spectacular year for electric vehicle sales, but still we have over a million EVs on the road now in the United States. This is just a look at the number of models that are available and I think that's very important to consumers. The first wave of EVs were for the most part kind of dorky looking cars. I drove one, it was a Nissan Leaf, it's a wonderful car, but it's not the coolest looking thing. But the next wave and the number of choices that are coming around for consumers is really standard. There's about 45 choices now for consumers and there's a lot more coming. We track all the announcements, the German automakers in particular are about to step up their game in a big way in part because they're repenting for the emission scandal that they suffered over the last couple of years over there. So there's more choices for consumers. All right, I'm gonna wrap up with a quick sort of review of what we would call the headlines. First, we would argue that how the U.S. has generated, generates, delivers and consumes energy are all fundamentally being transformed. I've talked a lot about generation, but I think there's other aspects as well that are worth talking about as well. First on the production side, gas production up about half. At the power plant, gas production, from gas generated power went from about, meeting about 24% of our power to close to 40% of our power. Coal generation, as I mentioned, fell by about half over that time. Renewable generation is up about 80% from 2010 to 2019 to contribute 18% of total generation. And in total, about 40% of our power was zero carbon, which is renewables plus nuclear power. Now, we've also seen growth in delivery and this is very important if we think about how you wanna get this lower carbon or zero carbon fuels to market. Gas distribution pipelines grew from 2.1 to 2.25 million miles. About $170 billion were spent by investor owned utilities on increasing transmission. Transmission is a whole separate conversation which maybe we'll come back to is incredibly important and difficult to do. And then on consumption, I kind of belabored the point a little bit in noting that we've now demonstrated repeatedly that the U.S. economy can grow without growing our appetite for energy of different forms. We saw the U.S. economy grow by about a quarter while our energy use only grew by about 6.5%. And of course, that's also partially because of deployment of all kinds of energy efficient devices and services. One example, smart meters, about 85 million of those and that's actually a data point that's not even quite through the end of the decade and over a billion LED light bulbs that have now been sold from basically zero 10 years ago as these have been getting deployed. The motivation for consumers to do this is not necessarily because they're trying to be green, they're just trying to save money and there's that opportunity there out there. And then finally, it's worth talking just for a moment about energy security. We started the decade, the last decade as a net importer of about $10 million, excuse me, 10 million barrels a day of oil. And we ended the decade at basically zero on a net basis worth always asterisking on a net basis. We do export and import both, but if you net those two out, we're basically close to zero. A lot of talk always in the Washington context about energy independence, energy security. I don't know how you exactly quantify that, but this is certainly a positive metric. We went from being a net importer of gas to being a net exporter and one of the world's leading net exporters of gas. And if you look at investment, we saw about $400 billion invested in the new clean energy assets over the last decade. I was around 10 years ago and sort of by our calculation in the prior life of the renewable energy industry up to that point in 2010, we'd seen about $100 billion. So it's been 400 since then. There's three and a half million people working in this industries now. And then finally, emissions. I'm not gonna dwell on this because I kind of talked about it, but the power sector is no longer the number one source of CO2 emissions. It is the transportation sector. And so as we think within the context of policy, there's a lot of stuff going on. There's bills going on. There's efforts at the FERC. There's all kinds of sort of hand-waving. To my mind, if I think about sort of the fate of the planet and CO2 emissions, the thing that keeps me most up at night are the CAFE standards around transportation because that's the one thing that we are really in an interesting kind of limbo period right now. And it is one thing that the administration can largely have its say over though California wants to fight with them about that quite a bit. And then finally, as I mentioned, we've seen a lot more options for consumers in terms of the types of ways that they can consume electricity and other forms of energy and lower costs overall. And with that, I'm just gonna say thank you and hand it over to Ruth. Not getting lights on. Is that going? Okay, we're on, we're on. Just not showing a light. So thank you, Ethan, for that presentation. My name is Ruth McCormick and I am the director of federal and state affairs for the business council for sustainable energy and I'm pleased to be with you today to help moderate our panel discussion where we'll dive a little bit more deeply into some of the details in the fact book. So I'm joined today by a panel of industry experts. There are bios for each of our speakers on a sheet of paper that's outside the room on the registration table. So I will refer you to that sheet for their more detailed biography but I'm going to introduce each of them by name and we'll just move down the line. And then I'm going to turn the time to them to just speak for a couple of minutes to a couple of the slides that speak to what has been happening in their industries over the last decade. And then we'll have a bit of a discussion here at the table and then followed by that we'll turn to you and ask you for questions. So if you have any questions, hold them and then we'll get to them in time. So I'm joined to my left by Emily Duncan who is the director of federal government affairs at National Grid. Next to Emily is Sean Garrison who is the director of congressional affairs and government relations for the Solar Energy Industries Association. Next we have Devin McMacken who is a senior policy advisor for ITC Holdings. And last at the end of the table we have Charles Hernick who is the director of policy and advocacy for Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions. So with that I'm going to turn to each of them again for several minutes to speak about the fact book and I think I'm going to just moderate the slides myself so when you are ready to look at another slide let me know and I'll advance it for you. So Emily. Sure, great, thanks. And thanks to BCSE and Bloomberg and EESI for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. So National Grid is an electric and gas company also known as a utility. We serve about 20 million people in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. We have 17,000 Americans working for the company and in this last year we invested about $4 billion in infrastructure in our three states and we expect a further $10 billion in investment over the next five years. I should also mention that I guess about a year ago now we acquired Geronimo Energy which is a large scale utility, or excuse me large scale renewable developer mostly wind and solar in the Midwest. So that's one of the ways that we can't own generation in the states in which we operate. We only own the pipes and wires that bring you the electricity and so that's one of the ways we're trying to expand our portfolio and help create a greener and cleaner economy if you will. So the first slide I'm going to address is one that Ethan addressed as well but is really looking at power sector emissions and where we are in that and certainly the power sector has done quite a bit to reduce our emissions over the past decade. It's been obviously a huge area of focus for us but I think it's important as we're looking at the house energy and commerce work and really applaud the committee for all the hard work that went into their initial draft of that bill but as we look at the clean energy economy and diversifying I think we need to look not only at the power sector we certainly have more work to do but also at the transportation sector, the industrial sector, the agriculture sector because those are also emitting carbon and so one of the things we're focused on at National Grid is in the transportation sector how do we work collectively with electric vehicle manufacturers to create a cleaner transportation economy and so we actually looked into about a couple of years ago put out a report on our three states and how we can expand the transportation in EV sector there and found that we need about 10 million more EVs on the road by 2030. We have about 100,000 today and so what more can we be doing in our region to bring more EVs on the road and so certainly we'll talk about policy requests towards the end of the presentation but that's certainly an area of focus for National Grid. I think the second slide, go to here. Oh yeah, that was the one on transportation, thank you. Yeah, so EVs. So again another slide that Ethan talked about but kind of teeing off on the EV piece is the availability of EVs, right? Certainly that's important for our customers is the availability of EVs. We're also looking at the used EV market which is growing in California. We think that's important to start reaching some of our lower income customers who may not be in the Tesla market. How do we get them into this marketplace? How do we help them adopt these types of vehicles and so we're very happy to see this the vehicle model availability kicking up here in North America. And then the third point I'll raise, if you could go to the next slide Ruth, is on the natural gas front. So we as I mentioned have invested significantly in our natural gas distribution and also our electric transmission infrastructure in the Northeast and these billions of dollars have gone in to help reduce methane, help replace pipes and help to green our gas system and one of the things we are starting to look at even more is RNG, renewable natural gas. We now use hundreds of thousands of gallons on an annual basis of biofuels for our fleet vehicles, the trucks that go out and help our customers but we also are looking at bringing on RNG plants. And so one of the things we're doing actually in Newtown Creek, New York, we're gonna be doing the ribbon cutting here in another month or so is partnering with New York City on their largest wastewater treatment plant and turning that into a plant that can a clean energy source, right? Transferring that into RNG and using that to power about 5,200 homes in New York City and enabling them to get heat from RNG. And so we're very interested in using our existing infrastructure and ingesting or I shouldn't say ingesting in putting in renewable natural gas into that system to help green our existing natural gas system. So I think I'll leave it at that and turn it over to Sean. Thank you. Thanks so much Emily. Yellow is our friend today and that's the solar industry's friend. You know, looking at this 10-year scope here I have to just tie it back to legislative history. Back in 2009, I think you remember we had a new president, President Obama. He introduced and through the house past the Waxman Market Climate Bill was not successful in the Senate and ramifications thereof. But through that debate, the opposition side always said, will solar wind will not grow over the next decade? It just won't happen. It won't strengthen. And the one piece that isn't hit right here is just cost. The cost just won't come down and scale down or to match it with other fossil fuels. Well, as you can see from right here, we've been deploying and we've been developing. Solar is taking over the renewable market and shared it with a lot of likelihood players. So I think for folks that are on the hill, especially those that I don't want to date myself, but kind of the 10-year history there, the thought that renewables are too expensive and they can't be on the market and they're too small scale and the grid can't handle them. It's just, it's not a truism. And you can see that from the numbers here. I think the other thing I want to highlight is while solar is great and we want to see solar continue to grow, solar was really born and ginned up from an investment tax credit that was under the 2005 Energy Policy Act. And I'm really dating myself. But that was a 30% investment tax credit. It actually expired this year, stepping down to 26 and going to 22 and then baked in 10%. That helped this growth. So when you hear from offices and when you hear from entities saying, pushing around these tax credits, this is one of the results from that. And it's the other thing I'll end with is while solar growth, we want to see that to the biggest level in proliferators as vastly as we can. We can't grow unless battery isn't storage grow. So the sun is shining great today, it might not shine tomorrow, it might shine great the next day. But at night and we don't have solar energy in the market and we're not able to extrapolate that energy, we gotta be able so as folks can turn on our flat screens and we can get on Netflix and do all that great stuff that we all wanna do, we need storage and we need a tax policy around storage that can get us to this same level in the next 10 years. So I'll turn it over to Devin, thank you. Thanks, Sean.  I work for a company called ITC Holdings Corporation and we are also an electric utility but we're somewhat unique in that we focus solely on building, owning and operating electric transmission infrastructure. So most utilities own smaller distribution lines, generation, things like that, we just do transmission. So our assets are located primarily in the Midwest. We have transmission in Michigan, Iowa in a few other places. And so what that means is that we've really had sort of a front row seat to the changes in the energy system that have happened over the last decade or so and primarily that's been movement away from coal, fire generation towards natural gas and wind and then more recently in recent years solar. And we like to think that we've played sort of a big role in helping to make that happen by making sure that the grid has been ready to integrate those new types of energy. I think what gets lost a lot of times when people think about sort of the energy transition and how the system works is that almost every time we connect a new solar or wind installation to the grid, that's always gonna require some sort of upgrade to the electric transmission system, whether it's building a new line somewhere or upgrading the lines that exist. And so as the scale of that transition increases and we expect more and more resources to move on to the grid, so too do the needs to invest in the electric transmission system. So I think we've had a lot of success doing that over the last 10 years and that's been one of the big drivers of the shifts that you see in the slide. However, I think a big message that I wanna convey today is that without sort of policy alignment at the state and the federal level, we can't necessarily expect that will continue. We tell policymakers all the time that, when and if we do have a national climate policy or if we just continue to rely on sort of market forces and consumer forces to bring about these changes, the grid is gonna be probably one of the primary roadblocks to allowing that to happen in a cost effective way for consumers. So I'm looking forward to talking more about sort of where we've come from, where we're going and what we need to do to make sure we continue to be successful. Thanks. So my name is Charles Hernick and I'm with an organization called Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions. Thank you, Dan, for hosting this event and thank you, Lisa, for pulling together a great group of folks and presenting an opportunity to talk about the facts. The whole time I've been sitting here, I've been looking at this quote from Isaac Newton at the back of the room that talks about an ocean of truth. And what I love about the fact book it is the most comprehensive view of the clean energy landscape that you can get. And good policy needs to be based on good data. So I hope that you all do take these facts to heart and utilize them in your day to day jobs. The slide that's shown here talks about global green bond issuance, but just quickly by show of hands, how many people want their money, money that they're spending or investing in, maybe it's your 401k, whatever it is, to be going more towards things that are environmentally beneficial and reducing greenhouse gas emissions as opposed to those who are not. Raise your hand if you want the green stuff. That's everybody that's paying attention. It's important to know that because you're not alone. Larry Fink who runs BlackRock Investments is applying climate change as a metric and looking at that in investments for what is the biggest global investor in the world. This slide shows, I wish it tracked over time and I think that's something that we'll go to, but just last year where the money was flowing for green bonds and so this is a special class of financial instrument that's really at the crossroads between supply and demand. What we're talking about when we're talking about market forces and I think that you saw those graphics early on that talked about the cost of clean energy. It has net, the economics of clean energy have never been better. And then you look at demand and that was looking at the power purchase agreements and that demand is surging. That's exponential growth and it's actually impressive to look at the fact book year on year and see that exponential growth continue. The one thing that you should write down and take home with you is that clean energy is a good investment. And the investment community is rallying to that. And it's shown here in the data it's not just something happening in the United States but happening a lot in Europe and really across the developing world as well. And so the point of this slide is not to get into the numbers and try to compare us to the Europeans but to acknowledge that behind this slide too is another exponential growth curve where investors are looking more concretely at how they can drive money and see that good investment, that good financial return and also get that good environmental return that you all in this room were looking for. And so CRAS as an organization, we're a right of center kind of market-based organization favoring all of the above clean energy. We don't make widgets. We're champions of the market and I think that what you're seeing here is pretty remarkable. And in the policies that we try to promote we try to encourage the market here in this direction where it is headed. And I hope that that's something we'll get a chance to talk a little more about. Thank you. So Charles referenced the quote that's here in the room from Isaac Newton. I've also been thinking about a quote from the Danish author and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard in which he said something to the effect that life can only be understood looking backward but it must be lived going forward. So I have been reflecting on that quote over the last few days and have thought how that really is applicable to what we're talking about with respect to the information from the Sustainable Energy in America fact book. So for my first question to our panelists I would like to get you to kind of pick up on that theme. I'm actually gonna ask two questions but we'll move through them one by one. And the first is as we look backward over what has happened over this sustainable energy in America decade where we have seen this transformation what is it in this decade that has stood out to you most? So I'm gonna go down the line and we'll ask Emily first and then Sean and Devin and Charles to answer that question. What is it in the fact book that stands out to you most? Thanks Ruth. So I think what stands out to me most is that we are a nation of plenty, right? I mean the amount of resources we have at hand to use I mean just to quote the fact book from 2010 to 2019 domestic natural gas production climbed more than 50% generation from renewable technologies jumped 77% in a decade. And to, I'm Sean I'm gonna give you all credit for this. And at 75 gigawatts there's 80 times more solar capacity online today than at the start of the decade, right? I mean that's just a remarkable numbers. And I think what's gonna be really interesting and fun to see is what states choose to do with that energy mix that they have at hand, right? What's gonna work best for their constituents for our customers, for consumers in each of these states. And so I'm just excited to see what the next decade can bring but I think seeing all of that come online and seeing the potential there is really remarkable. So I would say that's what struck me. Thanks. I think the thing that struck me the most is the fact that all this growth in the renewable sectors come from without a major policy pass in Congress. We have done this in the regulatory sphere as much as we can. We've, you know, we've browsed up the fact that how reliable this technology is and it was done without an HR passing. And while we don't want it to be that way, I think it's key to point that out. That growth can happen in our sector kind of without Congress telling us what to do but we love their guidance. So I think for me when I look at sort of all of the macro trends that are so well presented in the fact book what it really brings to mind is sort of how these things have worked together to make us think differently about what our electric system is and what it needs to do for us. So I think in the past the electric system was very much a one way sort of delivery machine and we invested in it to try to make sure that power was reliable, to try and make sure that it was as cheap as possible. But now within the last 10 years our thinking on that has changed quite a bit to where, you know, not only are we trying to facilitate sort of public policy goals or to make sure that we're being proactive about interconnecting new renewables but now we're seeing the need for basically the whole economy to become electrified and that's a really huge deal when we think about the electric system and the transmission lines that we have they're gonna need to support that in some fashion. And I think years ago people thought that maybe we can move to a more distributed direction where we would rely more on sort of rooftop solar and those are all gonna be part of it but really when we're thinking about a 100% electrified economy the centralized grid is going to need to be a very robust machine to make that happen. And so now we're at this point where we need to figure out how do we take these drivers and these new way of thinking about the grid and incorporate them in our policies because that's something that's very difficult to do and there really does need to be consensus at multiple levels of government around that to make it work the right way. So that's gonna be really I think the next challenge we need to face. Yeah, I think this is a great question Ruth and for me looking back at the fact book and where things have changed in my mind the thing that really stands out the most is the cost. The cost of clean energy, cost of natural gas, cost of renewables and very specifically to that is that the federal policy actually worked. The goal of federal policy and the tax incentives that were envisioned in 2005 and Sean I don't think it dates you at all I think that you're just a great historian. But the point of those tax credits was really to help along an early stage technology and help level the playing field. And we're seeing now we're in the sunset era of those policies you don't need the subsidies for solar and wind to be cost competitive. Now that doesn't mean it's not worth looking at them to achieve other policy goals. Climate change looms large in the background and very fortunately is a part of a lot of the conversations that are happening now on Capitol Hill. So in my mind the thing that really stands out is the cost, the policies worked for what the goals were at the time and how can we build off of that looking forward to achieve what are our next rounds of goals. So the second part of the Kierkegaard quote is that life must be lived going forward. So that leads me to the second question which is we're here in Congress where policy is being discussed. And I'm interested in knowing from each of our panelists what kinds of policies they would recommend that Congress and act to help us as we look forward in the next decade or more to come. And so I'm gonna mix it up this time. So Sean I'm gonna turn to you and then we'll ask our other panelists to reflect on those questions. What kinds of policies should Congress be considering? Thanks Ruth. Of course I talked about the investment tax credit and tax policies. I'll leave that in a bucket and of its own. And I think sound climate policies are really looking at our industry. Emily talked a lot about electric vehicles and that's kind of a combo deal. We have such political sparseness around it. Who's gonna survive? Will it be in mechanics? Will it, who's gonna live in this whole EV world? And I think we love to see Congress just take a comprehensive look at just our entire energy economy, not neglecting the fact that the power sector is going down on emissions and the manufacturing sector along with the transportation sector kind of eaked up. I think Congress should look at overall the climate policies and its impact on the economy being sector-based but also overall just looking at impact. I talked about the automakers. There's confusions could people just trust around issues trust around EVs, trust around solar. I'll be able to flip my light on and off in the same capacity. So how we can kind of, I wouldn't say water down or dumb down but get these issues to a capacity that the American people can really understand that these new energy revolutions can be beneficial and economical. Devin, do you wanna check it next? Sure. So I think to answer this question, I'm actually gonna look at a state model and folks may not expect this but it comes from Texas. Or maybe they did, I don't know. So about in the 90s, Texas realized that they had a really great wind resource in their state. One side of the state has a great potential for very cheap wind and the other side of the state has all the electric load essentially more or less. And so what they decided to do was not to wait for those wind farms to come online to sort of adjust the way they planned their grid to make that work. They decided to through a state policy facilitate the construction of that grid first and then hope and expect that because that infrastructure was available and because it was essentially financed by the entire state that that would spur wind development where it was most efficient in the state through that sort of top-down holistic planning process. And that was what was known as Texas Cres. I forget exactly what that stands for. And it was incredibly successful in doing just that. So I think today Texas, if I'm right, is the number one state for wind energy in the country. And I think that's very impressive but what often gets forgot about is way back in the 90s they started this Cres grid policy which really helped to spur that along. So when we think about the national level and transmission in its development is regulated through an agency called FERC. They sort of set the standards for how we do these things in some sense. But what we do right now is we sort of wait for the next renewable project to come along and then we analyze what do we need to do to the system to facilitate this project. So that's sort of reactive as opposed to proactive. What can be done is you can sort of flip the script and look at the Texas model and say where are our best resources in this country? Many of them are in the Midwest but there's great resources in all regions. And then what can we do from a grid planning perspective is sort of make sure that infrastructure is put in place now proactively and that'll bring those generators along. And what that means is not only can we accelerate the renewable transition but also we can make sure it happens as cost effectively as possible. So we can make sure that that trend line that you saw as far as US power prices stays flatter, goes down while making all these other things happen. Thank you Charles, do you have thoughts on policies? Yeah, there are three areas of policy that I think the federal government could do a lot for. Number one is certainty. The fact that the tax credits are coming down creates some uncertainty as to where things are going. If anyone is familiar with tax extenders and orphans and things of that nature you can Google that and you're gonna get a whole mess of how difficult and awful it has been for many renewable industries to be able to plan effectively more than one year out or more than one year back in most cases as it relates to tax credits. So offering the market certainty from a tax standpoint would be highly beneficial to guide those next rounds of investment over the next few years. The other is to look at ways to increase competition or reduce barriers to competition. Devin was talking about taxes and I think that that's an important market to continue to look at. We were looking at that exponential growth curve of power purchase agreements and in the footnote, a third of all those power purchase agreements were in Texas alone. And that's because Texas has one of the most competitive energy markets in the United States where if there's a willing buyer and a willing seller there's a way to get a deal done. And that's not the case in every state. And so looking at how to increase competition so that supply can actually meet the surging demand that exists for clean energy is really a non-trivial thing to overcome. And then the last part is I think the federal government could do more in terms of offering mechanisms for transparency and accountability in the space. Every day you can open up the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or your local paper and there's another company that's going like 100% renewables or 100% or they're committing to reduce by X million tons their carbon dioxide emissions, that's great. But we also wanna make sure that consumers are protected and actually getting what they're buying or that shareholders and investors are actually able to make those investments with some certainty that those commitments will come true. Green bonds are one mechanism for that but there are other ways that we could be tallying up the carbon dioxide emissions, adding up the renewable energy procurement and helping to make sure that customers have that information in front of them when they're checking out at the grocery store or making their investments for the next year as they're truing up their 401k or whatever it is. Emily, we'll close up that question with your thoughts on policy. Yeah, I agree with a lot of what's already been said. I think from our perspective, certainly the tax credits would be beneficial. We were very focused on the EV tax credit, the energy storage tax credit and we're very disappointed when those did not get expanded upon or passed at the end of this last year, I think to Charles's point, certainty is very important. In the EV world, what we're looking at is not only tax credits, I mentioned the used EV tax credit but also transportation, right? We would love to see a transportation bill or package go through Congress. We think that's really important. I mean, one point I will make around EVs is I think a lot of people look at the smart corridors and fast charging along highways and that's important. We should certainly put some focus and effort behind that but most EV owners are charging where they live and where they work and those aren't necessarily sexy pieces of infrastructure but they're very important pieces of infrastructure and so I do think we need to look at in coordination with our states and our cities and our localities and DOE in the labs and how do we encourage that type of build out? And whether that's partnering with municipalities, whether that's partnering with the corporations who are doing a lot of this PPA signing and an uptake, I think that's really a world that needs to be explored a bit more because while it's nice to be able to go on a road trip, you're not often going on road trips during the week, you're just going to bed at night and hoping your car's charged when you wake up in the morning. So we're kind of looking at a suite of options, I should say, around electrification and transportation. So it's not just tax credits, it's also transportation policy that helps support building out that market and I will highlight our concerns around the CAFE standards as well. We were very disappointed to see how the administration reacted to California's work there and we're hopeful to get some more certainty around that. I mean, I think auto manufacturers, many of them are as well, right? They're building out their fleets, for the next few decades, they've planned those out, right? And they plan those out with certain policies in mind and so it makes it difficult for them to respond and difficult for us to plan ahead for kind of if you build it, they will come type of mentality for what our customers will be looking for in the transportation sector moving forward. And then I think the only other point I'd make and Sean kind of talked about this as well, we really welcome this dialogue around climate, right? We have been supportive of carbon pricing, what that looks like I think still needs to be determined and we need to discuss that, but we are very happy to see that this conversation around climate is continuing and hopefully has been escalated a bit and so look forward to seeing where that goes over the course of this year and into next year. Thank you, Emily. I'd like to open it up to the audience for questions. Okay, we have one back here and I know just to point out that yeah, we have a microphone to circulate around the room. This is being recorded, so it'd be very helpful to speak in a microphone. There is a lavalier mic here. Oh, we have one right here. Okay, can I get back here in the very back? There's a hand. Could I get you to take it back there first? Then I think we have one up here upfront. And if you could identify yourself when you ask your question, please and then. Yes, hi, my name is David. From a climate perspective, there are a lot of good signs here, but there's obviously a long way to go still and the IPCC has said that we need to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. And so I'd like to know from anyone on the panel who'd like to answer this question. Realistically, honestly, how feasible is that? Just in the power sector alone, but considering the fact that if we wanna get net zero emissions from other sectors as well, they're going to have to electrify putting additional strain on the grid. I think it's just on a little bit. All right, I'll take a stab at it. Well, the debate around 2030, 2050, it's up in the air. I talked a lot about batteries and storage and that being kind of the next tranche that we need to really develop to get us to where we need to go. So that's wind and storage. You're talking about cross-sectors, you think about carbon capture and sequestration. We're not up here pushing those efforts, but that's what's really in the manufacturing sector, that's what's really gotta happen for them in order to capture that carbon. It comes from all these factories and plants. And then of course, in the electric vehicle sector, does America want these vehicles? I think there are almost like 260 million vehicles on the road, I'm not really sure. But I think we have to sell this as a popularity contest almost. What do Ethan alluded to this small kind of ugly EV of 10, 15 years ago, but what is a person right now really wanna have? So we gotta think about all those things. And this is not just a numeric piece. You see the cost are down, but it's also a popularity piece. It's also taking Americans out of their normal beings. If I've been driving a V6 for 20 years and all of a sudden you're bringing me an EV and it's just not the same world, that's concern. And it's hard for the Congress to try to address those kind of emotional issues that the country is dealing with in transition, but you have to. I will say that I have a 17 year old son who has recently learned to drive and he wanted to learn to drive a stick shift so he could get the feel of the mechanics. I said, you know what, don't bother. Your next car will be an EV. So we have a question up here. Oh, I think Ethan wanted to, oh, I'm sorry. Just to have one thing on that. Look, short answer is no, we're not gonna get there unless there's some serious changes in policy. And it's great that we've made the progress that we have. And Bloomberg NEF, we have long-term projections out to 2050. Ours are probably the most optimistic compared to the IEAs and anybody else's. And we do think that the power sector continues to decarbonize, but and we think we see a massive amount of solar in particular just to come online and batteries. But there is no way under our current projection that you will get to net zero unless there's some major additional policy making at the very least carrying out of the existing policies like in the form of the regulations on transportation but to be clear. And one other point I would just make is that any projections out to trying to get to net zero from 2040 to 2050 typically has some kind of magic technology factored in that gets you there. Some technology that does not exist today and some people think it's hydrogen, some people think it's CCS, whatever it is. We don't disagree with that though. Like we have trouble seeing how the existing suite of technologies could get you there. And so you will need an additional technology. And I only raise that within the context of some of the conversations around legislation going on on the Hill right now and supporting for things like CCS and hydrogen. Our view is that's important. That doesn't, let's be clear. That will not on its own solve the problem and anybody who says it is, that's, you know, they're not being honest about it. But if you can get a win out of this Congress to support some of those long range technologies, I would suggest people take those wins. And by those people I'm talking about Democrats working with Republicans to get those bills passed. We got a question right here in the front. Yeah. Thanks, Paul. I'll be kind of a cheapskate in the spirit of the used EV discussion. I think a lot of it is just people's awareness. I bought three years ago, I used 2013 Nissan Leaf, which has proved to be the best, most reliable, least cost of ownership car I've ever had. And I think people just aren't doing their homework. And when they do, they'll see that it is actually cheaper already for probably the vast majority of car owners to get an EV now if it's used or otherwise. So, but my question is, Ethan, you showed the levelized cost of energy and the cheapest for wind, solar, and hydro. And then, of course, kind of what Sean was pointing out, the cost of storage is still very high. How should that inform our investments in some of these other technologies that you started to talk about just now? Hydrogen, advanced forms of fission, solar power satellites, fusion power, things that are still kind of far in the future and have a lot of technological uncertainty with them. How should our investment be shaped to accommodate both what we know now and what we could see potentially coming in the future? So, first of all, I think you're driving my old car. And we did lease a leaf for three years, actually, for longer than that. And we loved the car, and so enjoy it. If it's black, that's my car. Second, to your question, the answer, to my mind, is yes, and. Or all of the above, whatever you want to describe it, we need to invest in the technologies we want to have come online in 2040. And those forms of investment probably take the form of grants or tax credits to support pilot and experimental technologies. We also need support in the short run for existing technologies that are really on the verge of being commercially viable. And that is potentially behind the meter batteries and utility scale batteries as well. And so the tax credit that was up for potential, the 30% tax credit for the batteries last year would have been very helpful to storage, would have been very helpful to solar for that matter. And one last thing, just back on EVs, your point's entirely well taken. We would make the argument that right now there are many, many households in the United States for whom owning an electric vehicle is an entirely economically rational decision. If you look at the number of households that have two cars, right? And if you sit down and you do just a little bit of thinking about how you use your cars, you probably realize that one of them, you'd be perfectly happy if it could not travel more than 100 to 150 miles, because you use it to commute and to take your kids to soccer games or whatever. You need another car to go visit grandma, right? But if you got two, just do a little bit of math and you can figure out that it will save you money to get an EV right now. Okay, we've got a couple of front row questions.  Hi, I have a question about the increased volume of natural gas production we've had and the impact that that's had on the price of hydrocarbons generally. I'm wondering how much cheap natural gas and abundant oil have brought down the price of oil and have encouraged the growth in transportation sector greenhouse gas emissions? Okay, the question was about the price of natural gas and bringing down the cost of oil, Ethan, is that one you wanna take? Yeah, I'm trying to see you around this podium, but it's an interesting question. I mean, look, first of all, there's a lot of many ramifications of cheap gas and we're still trying to figure out what all of them are, but on the positive side is a vis-a-vis oil. Take New England where I grew up, a lot of people still heat their homes with oil and we're seeing a lot of those gas replacing oil in New England to a large degree and that is emissions reduction fundamentally. I don't think, it's interesting the interplay between gas prices and oil prices. The price of gas used to be very much pegged of the price of oil and it's become more independent in recent years, but a lot of gas is produced as a byproduct of oil production. So the two do have a relationship overall, but I'm trying to think of other markets and the oil is not typically burned very much at all in US power generation. And in the rare cases where it is, if the overall so-called stack of different available options comes down, then oil often gets priced out of the market in the power market also. So generally speaking, I think gas has allowed us to move away from oil in many cases, at least on the power and the residential side. Harder for me to frankly offer a really informed thought on how it infects the transportation sector. We haven't seen a whole lot of use of gas in transportation, but it could and probably should grow in some areas because it is lower emission and it also frankly is cheaper if you're trying to run a truck from San Antonio to Houston. Cost of natural gas down in Texas is really almost free in some cases. And so the opportunity to have it be a replacement fuel for diesel is definitely there, but we've only seen the limited amount of that so far. You can I think Emily might have more to add? Yeah, I mean, so we're doing a lot of those oil to natural gas conversions in our service territory. We have a lot of customers to Ethan's point in the Northeast who are still relying on home heating oil, which is quite polluting. I will make the point though that while we have decided we have studied this and basically in order to reach some of the climate goals that we have and certainly in the home heating sector, we have to triple the rate of those oil to natural gas conversions over the next 10 years. That's gonna be very hard to do without more gas infrastructure in the Northeast, which has been a real struggle for us. We've had to limit the amount of customers we can bring online with natural gas because of the lack of infrastructure in the three states.  Okay, and I will turn to you. And if you could please identify yourself. Hi, Doris Marlin, Retired Department of Defense and now engaged citizen. Yeah. My question is primarily directed to Devin and Emily and it seems like the most vulnerable area of getting to a sustainable nation is the grid. And secondly, the power markets and those seem to be the most mysterious and elusive to affect change. So could you just kind of step us through or me through what are like the overall roadblocks and how can we really get through that because it seems like there's just this lock on an ability to influence those two areas. Thank you. Do you wanna go first? Sure, okay. It's like a billion dollar question. This is a great one. So just starting with the grid, I mean, I think if you talk to engineers in our industry and at my company who are very, very smart, they will tell you that if they are given a goal to plan for, they can plan for a system that's about 80% reduction in emissions by 2050. And I think that last 20% is a lot of where the magical technologies come in and that's another subject. But there is currently no consensus in policy arenas about how to implement that goal. So the planners need to be given a goal and then they can work towards it. So I think that just speaks to the need for some sort of national policy on climate, whether it's a price on carbon or however you wanna implement it. If that is put in place, that will help to sort of be the impetus to get through some of these log jams and these debates that happen in the regions about how we plan the grid, how we pay for the grid, those sorts of things. We also need to determine as a society how we're gonna pay for this infrastructure. Right now, most grid upgrades are paid for locally. And so you have big disparities in sort of what the transmission piece of the bill is in a given region of the country. But if you wanna have sort of a national policy of building out the grid to achieve these goals, those benefits are national. And so we need to think about sharing costs in a way that's equitable and sort of builds in that pathway to get to the grid of the future, if you will. And then finally too, you use the word vulnerable and I think that's a great word because we've seen sort of the emergence of concerns about resilience of the system. So not only are we trying to transition our electricity sources, but also climate risks due to weather are growing. We've seen that in places like California where the system is actually vulnerable to wildfires and things like that. So we also need to think a lot about how do we harden the systems while we're building them out to achieve these goals. And that's another cost that gets borne through electric bills. And we can offset that by interconnecting cheap resources, but we also need to think about where should the incidents of those costs really be? Is there a role for federal policy to sort of help defray some costs and with a tax credit or something like that, but also really there needs to be sort of a national policy on grid costs and how they're shared? Yeah, I completely agree. I think national grid covers, has customers in the wealthy suburbs of Boston and then we have customers in economically hard at areas in upstate New York, for example.  And so if we are gonna make this transition and we feel it as a transition we need to make, we also need to think about those consumers, those customers and how they are gonna bear a portion of the brunt of the cost of making these transitions to a cleaner grid, a more resilient grid. So I think we need to continue to have this conversation but keep those folks in mind, because how do we do this effectively? On the markets question, I am not a markets expert, so I don't wanna get into trouble here. I think if you look at what FERC is doing in this area, there's a lot of dialogue around this now. Basically, FERC just recently issued a decision in PJM about how are we valuing the resources subsidized or not that are coming into that market. There was also recently a decision on another market and what the return on equity would be for utilities that are building transmission in those markets. Those are all really complex issues and there's a lot of people trying to figure those out. But FERC is certainly gonna play a larger and larger role in figuring out these markets. I think what we don't wanna necessarily see happen and this is just speaking on behalf of me, not national grid is, we don't wanna see all of these utilities start to leave these markets, right? Because then you're having, we have these regional transmission organizations, we have these independent system operators throughout the country. There was a slide showing the costs across these various regions. I do wonder what happens to customers if utilities start pulling out of these markets, right? So we need to make these markets work for those of us that are participating in them. And I think there's a real question about how to do that reliably in a clean way and cost effectively for our customers. So it's a huge debate and one that we're all trying to figure out. And I'll jump in here too with hopefully the simplest answer to what is a very complex problem and you're dead right. Because the markets are complicated and although it's beautiful that every day of my life I've turned on the lights and the lights have come on, we have 100 years of built infrastructure that is essentially dragging this transition to clean energy economy. The simplest solution is to empower individuals and customers to get what they want in terms of clean energy. And you see in the states where corporate customers can get what they want in Texas, money is flowing that way. And you will quickly see states trying to catch up because otherwise they're losing money to Texas and they don't wanna do that. If you can empower individuals and in some states individuals can choose what kind of energy they get. They don't have to pay a premium price in all cases because clean energy is cheaper than everything else. Right now the Carolinas are looking at deregulating and offering more consumer choice at the consumer level. In other states they're looking at offering more corporate competition. What I talked about earlier in terms of being able to empower consumers through mechanisms for transparency and accountability really do matter and a much more of an optimist than Ethan because I do believe that there's not a bar in America, there's not a coffee shop in Washington D.C. where you can't talk to the person to the left or to the right of you about climate change and everybody knows it's real, gotta do something about it but that's when the conversation gets uncomfortable, right? What are we gonna do? And transportation is a major issue but I'm a big believer in carbon capture, utilization and storage. If we look all around us there are carbon based products and there are companies that are looking to make money off of capturing carbon dioxide whether it be from a coal fire power plant or a natural gas power plant or from direct air capture and produce useful things from it. There's a small company in Manhattan that direct air captures carbon dioxide and produces liquor from it.  If we can empower customers to make these decisions we'll go a long way and companies like Occidental Petroleum whose business model is based off of fossil fuels are going big on being able to be a green fossil fuel company. What does that mean? What that means is that for every gallon of oil or gallon of gas that's coming out of one end that they have sequestered on the front end carbon dioxide equivalent to the carbon emissions that are coming out. I wish I was in the market for an electric vehicle. Every month I look at my financial spreadsheet and I'm like is it this month? It's still not. Not every American is in the position to buy or rent or lease or buy a new or even used electric vehicle. That's the truth. And then even when they do those cars just get passed along to other people I'm envious of Ruth's son that's gonna get an electric vehicle. But companies like Occidental Petroleum are looking at how they can monetize and sell green fossil fuels. So if you're driving down the street and then the decision is between the gas station on the left and the gas station on the right and the gas station on the left sells green fossil fuels that where the carbon dioxide has been sequestered either through direct air capture or enhanced oil recovery or planting trees. Which one are you gonna pick? So I'm an optimist. These technologies are real. They're coming down the pipeline fast and they will be implemented more and more as consumer demand can be met. And the opportunity to see that next generation of useful technologies is real. Next week, Senators Murkowski and Manchin will introduce a bill to do just this. It focuses substantially on research and development and providing more certainty to folks that are even in the carbon capture space. It's gonna be a bill that's worth looking at and details aren't available now. Otherwise I'd love to tell you more. It's not a climate bill, it's a down payment on climate change. And so the opportunities are here, they're immediate, they're in front of us and some of those policies will be coming down quicker than we think. Thanks for coming up on the end of our time. But time for one more quick question. I think I've got another one here on the front row. Sorry. For those of you who didn't get a chance to ask then you can come up afterward and we'll be happy to talk with you. So go ahead. Great, thanks. My name is Sheila, I'm from the Climate Leadership Council. Thanks so much for the presentation. I have a question addressing Ethan. You were talking about energy cost saving potential. Looking back you were saying that this is a reality and I was hoping you can speak a little bit more on that looking forward. Is this really the case as we continue to decarbonize? Just to be clear in terms of how much are we gonna continue to save, will we save money if we continue to use lower carbon fuels? Or will it cost to come down while decarbonizing? Yeah, I mean, look, we've done it so far. I would say, and I take that as proof that it can be done. I think the question going forward is, really is, well frankly, to be a director at is about the role of gas. And if we continue to have gas play a bigger and bigger role it is going to continue to put pressure on prices, which is good I think for the end consumer but it will be within a couple of years that the gas will be the number one source of CO2 emissions from the power sector. And so then the question is if you're serious about net zero should we be building a lot of additional gas to continue to meet our energy needs? I think that's a real question which a lot of people are discussing going forward. So if you, the benefits of cheap gas we've definitely enjoyed, we'll continue to enjoy them going forward but I think there's real questions about how much more gas we can continue to do if we wanna reduce CO2 emissions. So I hope that sort of answers the question but I think we're at an interesting juncture now. Gas has done a remarkable job at basically helping us retire coal very quickly. And now the next question is, where do we go over the next 10 years? We're gonna have to end it there but I would like to thank everyone for their participation and their questions. And just know that the business council for sustainable energy is very interested in all of the legislative activity that is happening up here on Capitol Hill. And if anyone has any questions or would like more input from our organization or for any of our panelists, please let us know. We'd be happy to answer any questions that you have. And thanks again to EESI for hosting this event with the business council for sustainable energy and also to the house science committee. So thank you Dan. Oh, thank you Ruth. I think they deserve a round of applause. I really, like I said, encourage everyone to go online. We covered a lot of ground today but would you believe it? We didn't talk about building codes. We didn't talk about energy savings performance contracts. We didn't talk about benchmarking and disclosure. We didn't really talk that much about renewable natural gas. We didn't talk that much about biogas, biomass, geothermal or waste energy. Those are just some additional topics that are covered in the back book. And so go online if those topics are of interest to you and check them out. It's a really tremendous resource. I have to thank the Renewable Energy and Energy and Efficiency Caucus, our co-chairs, Representative Loksak, Senator Reed and Senator Crapo, Vice Chair, Senator Van Hollen and Senator Collins. Let me also thank Lisa, who had to take off a little bit early but thanks to Ruth and Laura and the whole BCSE team. Thanks to Ethan and all of your analysts and all of the hard work that has Bloomberg and NEF. What a tremendous panel. Emily, Sean, Devin and Charles, tremendous job. And Charles, I think you gave us a great idea for a t-shirt. Climate change, bad booze. I feel like we should all show up wearing t-shirts and say that next time. Thanks again. Also, I just get to stand up and say these sorts of things, but this kind of event wouldn't happen without the hard work of Team ESI, Team BCSE. Special thanks to Omri, Dan O'Brien, our folks taking notes, everyone on Twitter. Thanks everyone for your hard work today. This was a tremendous briefing and I think we have a few minutes to hang out and hopefully do some networking. So thanks again and another round of applause for a chance.