Okay, we can give just a few more people to take their seats. Okay, we will go on to the next presentation before I turn this over. I just wanted to make a couple of comments. At last council meeting, I announced the fact that I had appointed Laura Rodriguez to be the director of the Office of Policy Communications and Education. She had previously been acting director of that office for a number of years and I wanted to make her a permanent fixture. I will tell you that when I became director that area of the institute was probably the least familiar to me and Laura really served a very important role in helping me learn a lot about those components of the institute and I relied on her extensively to continue to teach me and to prepare me for aspects of this new job that requires that kind of knowledge. She's been a terrific partner for that and so I wanted to make sure that she had a chance to be introduced to council more formally and to have an opportunity to present updates about this large organization that she runs which is part of the Office of the Director. So that's why we arranged it for this council. There's an indication of how important I think Laura is to our organization. Her office is directly next to mine. Now that's a classic blessing and a curse. It's my blessing and it's her curse. But this was a good opportunity for you to hear about what's happening in this part of our organization. Laura. Okay, thank you. Really that was just his way of advance blaming me for anything that he does wrong in the future since I've told him that it was fine, not a problem. So I am going to try to introduce a little bit today the Office of Policy Communications and Education and where we sit in the institute and what we do for the institute. We're always sitting in the back of the room at these council meetings and we all interact with each of you in different ways into different extents. But I think our function within the institute and why we're always sitting in the back of the room may not have been clear before. So hopefully after this it will be. And hopefully my real goal is to hopefully identify some areas that you're interested in and encourage more interaction between my group and you all as council both for the benefit that I know we will gain from having direct interaction with you all but hopefully we'll be able to be helpful to you as well. So we're going to just really talk about the who, the what, and the why a little bit and try to go through it relatively quickly. We sit within the office of the director within the institute from an organizational standpoint but what we do really reaches across the research portfolio both in the intramural program and in the extramural program with a direct connection to science being the base for everything that we are doing and the research that is happening in genomics both funded by NHGRI and also that that's funded out there by others and being accomplished by others because we are tracking the field as a whole to stay on top of it for the institute. We are made up of four individual branches, a policy and program analysis branch, communications and public liaison, education and community involvement and genomic healthcare and we usually refer to ourselves by our acronyms so if I slip into that please forgive me I'm trying not to today so that you can actually know what we're doing and there are many people that make up these branches and I'm going to go through what they do very quickly and not have time to cover in depth the real breadth of things that they work on day to day and the work that they do but we're relatively small office to conduct all the different activities that are going to be covered within our scope and my staff is incredibly dedicated and committed to the work of the genome and to the work that they need to do for each of their individual missions. As I mentioned already the aim here of everything that we do is to move forward from the research as our base to be informed by that research to conduct policy development, policy mediation in some cases and outreach activities to the various stakeholders that we have and ideally feed that back into the research process to either help in the best case scenario or to at least get feedback on what isn't working so that we can go back and try to redress that through new policy activities or new outreach activities going forward. As Eric mentioned there are many people that make up this group I've put all of their pictures here because we didn't have time to do the tag team kind of presentation that I would have liked to let each of the groups talk about the things that they're doing and there will not be a quiz on all of the names later for the people in the back of the room and I'll try to show their pictures again in a bigger format as we go through. So our primary function really is to get the message of the institute out about the research and about what we're doing to try and bring genomics to the improvement of healthcare options. We do that in various ways. Most of what we do spends a lot of time in meetings we're building relationships, we're talking to people and we're writing a lot of documents to get the stories out there and to get our messages and our positions into the conversation whether it's an internal government conversation out to stakeholders, out to students whomever it might be that we're interacting with at a particular time. Our various audiences of course begin with the research community itself but extends to healthcare practitioners of course Congress, the White House, the department we need to consider them our audiences as well since they directly control what we do and how many resources we have to do it with them so we want to make sure they understand where we're going. We take our education mission very seriously so we interact a lot and have a lot of activities targeted to students and to teachers and professors and of course the general public who is the ultimate benefactor of all of the research that we do and someone that it's very important that we have a good relationship with from a standpoint of public trust to support the research enterprise as a whole but also so that they can begin to understand and appreciate what genomics will be able to do for them in their lifetimes and for their children and then the media of course because they are a further megaphone for all of our stories going out and it's important that they understand what we're doing and that we have a good relationship with them. Audiences also equal potential partners and we're going to go through all of them here but just as a representative of course for researchers for example we work a lot with groups such as ASHG Joe Boffman is here very loyally every time our council gathers and we also talk to her in between and as well as other professional organizations to make sure that we're trying to stay in touch as possible with the investigator community to know what is happening what challenges you all are facing and what we might be able to do to help and of course then with the public we work with the genetic alliance again with the media as well as other advocacy groups such as the National Congress for American Indians who we have a partnership right now with trying to go forward as they have issues with genetics and genomics research and trying to bring them into partnership with what the goals are and of course all of the interactions with various federal agencies again going back to the fact that NHGRI is a relatively small institute and our office is relatively small probably 80% by leveraging our resources and forming partnerships with others tag teaming on two places where they have activity because a lot of what we're interested in doing in bringing genomics into healthcare we don't actually have any purview over because we are a research organization and so to be able to get to the back end or downstream activities necessary we need to form partnerships with groups such as the FDA and ARC for instance so talking first now about our policy and program analysis again here's the staff as Eric mentioned has recently come on board we're going to show his picture as many times as possible today to make sure that the image of his face becomes burn into your mind and you know that he's someone you can talk to and the kinds of things that this group focuses on for the most part but it really can be quite a broad array of activities is legislative liaison activities that relations kinds of work representing the institute to the NIH to the department to the White House as necessary interacting with our scientists to make sure that we know what's happening in our research portfolio reporting on that portfolio to the NIH and to others and to Congress so that we can justify the spending that we have and of course interacting with the public to make sure that our policies that are going forward and how we're conducting our research is responsible and is meritorious of the public's trust Eric already mentioned this is mostly his slide from before that we track appropriations we track other pieces of legislations we were very involved in GINA before but in addition to that we also have a responsibility as part of the administration to work with Congress and to provide understanding and to help them from a technical perspective to know what we're doing and what our research is doing and so we try and build new relationships and those are very important to NIH and to us as an institute so that there is understanding and appreciation for the kinds of things that we're trying to do and so we think a lot about who these relationships are with and making sure that we are available to them one of the issues that NIH is facing generally is the fact that many of our previous champions have either passed away or retired and so NIH in general is facing a problem of needing to build new relationships to Senator Tom Harkin is one of the major ones that still is part of the leadership structure for our appropriations and our authorizing committees and many of you probably know this but there are two different structures Eric alluded to it and to how things are going to happen for NCATS and for the CURES network going forward in that appropriations controls our money obviously we care a great deal about them I've shown here the leadership for both the full committee and the subcommittees but also our authorizing committees are very important because they are the ones that give us permission to try to do the things that we want to do and we do need to have permission almost all of the time before appropriations will give us money to do it it's not a perfect system and sometimes appropriators just will things to happen but in general it's best to have your authorizers on your side and to make sure that they understand what we're doing in addition we try to look to other members of Congress of course our Maryland delegation there are many others within the Maryland delegation that we also talked to that I've just listed those with direct relevance to NIH as a constituent but certainly with the number of workers employed at NIH that live in other parts of the state there's a wide array of people that are following us from the delegation and I've also shown again just a sampling of other people who have expressed an interest in genetics and whom we're trying to talk to again to try to build up a stronger relationship with them as they're newer to leadership positions or newer to positions where they might need to understand more about NIH than they may have in the past and so we want to make sure that we're available to them and to their staff so that they don't have questions or they don't have any misunderstandings with what we're trying to do some quick updates with other things within the policy round that we track for the institute the stem cell funding had some news since the last council so Judge Lambert who had previously I guess about last August issued an injunction against the NIH to prevent us from doing stem cell research that injunction was later reversed and so the NIH was continuing but he now revisited his decision and made a summary decision to state that the NIH was not in violation of the legislative prohibition that we were being I guess not accused that sounds a little bit antagonistic but they were stipulating that we were doing which had to do with the creation or destruction of embryos there were two scientists who were adult stem cell researchers who were saying that the funding of embryonic stem cell research was preventing them from obtaining the resources they needed and Judge Lambert ruled in such a way that the NIH can continue to go forward as we have been doing and also issued his ruling such that appeals are not likely to happen so we should move on from this issue for now also in the courts there was another ruling in the ongoing series of activity with regard to the myriad suit over the BRCA 1 and 2 patent this is a picture of Neal Katyal who was the acting solicitor general back in the spring when the the suit moved to the Federal Circuit of Appeals and the Department of Justice actually took such an interest in this case and not only did they issue a brief but the acting solicitor general argued for the case and this was quite a statement in terms of the government's position with regard to the fact that they were now stating that isolated DNA they felt was not patent eligible unfortunately the decision that came down from the courts was that they in a 2 to 1 ruling that they did think that isolated DNA was patent eligible there was another decision which agreed with the Department of Justice's position that CDNA is patent eligible and the court also found that in a unanimous decision that the methods claim that associated the genotype to the phenotype as described in the myriad patent was invalid but it was invalid as written and which leaves a lot of room for it to be appealed or for people to write their claims in the future in a way that would not be considered to be invalid at this point appeals have been filed again from both sides so this is going to go forward it's not clear yet whether it will be heard by the full panel of the Federal Circuit of Appeals this ruling came down from just a sub-panel of three of the judges and so it may be heard by all 10 that sit on the bench or it may be taken up by the Supreme Court and we are waiting to find out what that decision will be other things that policy covers don't worry I'm not going to go through this again this is what I generally talk to all about but we do try to develop new policy new policies for the agency new policy positions that promote genomics research and data sharing of course has been a major subject over the past few years and our institute has played a leadership role across the agency in moving these forward something that's coming up more recently in July as I'm sure many of you know the government put forward an advance notice for proposed rulemaking to update the common rule which governs human subjects research and there are many many sweeping changes in this ANPR and that is currently out for public comment until the end of October but there are several that have direct relationship to genomics and in particular is the fact that there's a statement now that genetic samples should be considered inherently identifiable but one of the new themes that is introduced through this ANPRM is that the way that risk should be overseen within our oversight system is based on a risk classification scheme so while it deems that genomics genomic data and biospecimens are identifiable it classifies them as really having informational risk associated with them which would just call into place new standards for data privacy and data security so there are a lot of questions out there about what exactly this means and how it's going to be interpreted in prosmaking faces at the moment again other things that will go forward is the data security protections are calibrated to identifiability this concept of risk classification and calibration of risk to the oversight measures in place is something that's been talked about for a long time so in general it's a good thing but the devil is definitely in the details of how to do this another thing that will be important for our community is that because of this again determination that genetic samples are identifiable there's also an assertion that written consent should be required for all uses of existing research samples it does have a clause in there to allow grandfathering of existing samples at the time that the rule would go into place but going forward it would expect that there will be written consent for every tissue collection if it were to be used for research and that is drastically different than the way most of our collections come into genomics research today moving on to genomic healthcare this is our newest branch it was created in 2007 it is also our smallest branch it is avally stuffed by Greg Fero and Jean Jenkins who are both technically part-time and both work more than full-time hours I think going forward but it's really was a recognition that it was time to look at the needs of providers in terms of readiness for genomics to come into the clinic if we were to be successful with improving patient outcomes and this branch in particular has worked very closely with its various partners and stakeholders and I've shown them here below just to remind us that that's really always where our base comes from but they have partnered very heavily with different parts of the government as well as with different professional organizations another update from things that have been happening that normally Eric would have talked about we've talked before about this series it is co-edited by Greg Fero and Alan Gutmacher in the New England Journal of Medicine on genomic medicine and the eighth and ninth publications in this series came out since our May Council going forward on the genomics of the eye and microbial genomics this series continues to receive very positive feedback going forward and there are a few articles left in the series before it concludes one of the things like all things genome that Genomic Healthcare does is to build resources and community resource tools and one of the things that they put a lot of their effort into has been the family health history project to build a tool for family history in partnership with the Surgeon General and in the last few years in partnership a great deal with the National Cancer Institute to have this going so that there's a tool that's available online for members of the public to go in and create a family history with their individual family health history recorded they can print it out they can take it to their doctor and they can talk to their doctor about it and they have been working to make it interoperable with other electronic health record excuse me, information and also to begin to create risk algorithms for certain diseases so at the moment they are working on one for colon cancer and there is one for cardiovascular history I believe that ClinSeq has been using going forward. In addition again going back to their education mission within the branch they are creating resources for curricula development for the various health practitioners. Working in partnership with those health practitioner organizations and professional organizations at the moment this relatively new web based resource the Genetics and Genomics Competency Center for Education has curricula and educational materials posted for genetic counselors for nurses and physician assistants going forward and we are always looking to add new disciplines to this. We have a meeting coming up this fall to begin talking to the pharmacist community where we have invited 14 of their many professional organizations to come in and have a very work oriented small group discussion around what the needs are within the pharmacist community around Genomics and how we can begin to move that and develop professional I mean educational materials and perhaps post that into G2C2 over time. Another update just to let you all know about is that Greg and Eric have recently published an article in JAMA and their special education issue around the health needs and for educating health practitioners to bring about genomic medicine and in this they have made arguments for the fact that we need to build an evidence base for genomics medicine that is going to be important that we also need to have genomics educational material for non-genetics health professionals as this is going to be something that is going to be disseminated across the health scheme and also that we need to have increased efficiencies in how we are using health information technology and again that is nothing new to these conversations or to many of the other conversations that we have had around the institute about translating genomics into the clinical setting. We also support as an institute the Institute of Medicines Genomics Roundtable which has been meeting for about four years on different issues around bringing genomics into clinical care. Greg Ferrell currently sits on that Roundtable as Jeff Ginsburg and the most recent workshop we have updated you from time to time on workshops was on integrating large scale genomic information into clinical practice and it was a very popular meeting very well attended and the workshops of the group have continued to be increasingly relevant and the group itself has continued with the dissolution of the Secretary's Advisory Committee to play an increasingly important role in providing a forum for discussion about policy issues around genomics. Our Education and Community Involvement Branch has again a dual mission much as Genomic Healthcare was looking at integrating genomics into clinical care as well as an education mission here we have an education mission both leveled at the K through 12 and undergraduate communities as well as community organizations themselves and members of the public and this Venn diagram is something that Vince Bonham has put together with his group which explains how things different how their various missions and activities overlap together. They again are interacting with several different members of our stakeholder groups from teachers and professors to members of the general public as well as community based organizations. One of the things that Vince has been particularly involved with himself is the organization of a very targeted small workshop on studying sickle cell disease that will take place this December it will take place one neighbor four in conjunction with the hematology meeting so that we have many of the experts together so this will happen in San Diego it is sponsored as many things are that we do with several other institutes so that we can bring the various disease based institutes together around our tool building genomics science and we have several members of the community involved as external co-chairs and I know there are a lot of the agenda for this meeting looks very exciting and we expect good things to come from their discussion to move the treatment options and using genomic strategies for treatment options forward I've mentioned that one of the missions for ECIB is to work with communities and so also to highlight the fact that we try and work together across our branches I wanted to show you the number of different translations that ECIB had worked with to take the family health history tool and translate that to other languages so that it can be useful to all sectors of our population and also as I mentioned we've done we have a new partnership that's going forward with the National Congress of American Indians to help them put together a resource for their community on human subjects research and we've done work in the past in that same general area with the South Central Foundation from Alaska many of you hopefully all of you are familiar with the education outreach activities in particular DNA day that our education branch puts together we also have a genomics careers resource which could hopefully be something that's a useful resource to you all with your students and we've talked many times about the talking glossary that was recently updated and released and now the Spanish version of that talking glossary will be coming out this October and we wanted to let you all know about that in addition to the fact that as of this morning our new iPhone app for the talking glossary is available so that students and others that have iPhones can make sure to have handy any definition that they might need or an illustration to explain some complicated genetics factoid as they're going on the run so through the iPhone app you can see all of the information that's available through the web the illustrations the 3D images as well as the audio descriptions of the definitions so that it's not just written and it's a very interactive tool as well as it is on the web are these all done by Eric or is there a voice that's easier to understand because this St. Louis accident is pretty strong these are not all done by Eric so we went around to many different people and so and actually we have several iPhones that are here and have this now loaded on for anybody that wants to play with it at the break we can use this it was optimized for the eye touch again thinking about who the user population will be for this it works on the iPad but not as well but certainly that something we'll look at as iPads continue to be become a great educational resource and more and more schools are getting them for use in the classrooms another annual event just to let you know that took place over the summer was the summer workshop in genomics where the education branch brings in professors from various undergraduate institutions from around the country for an intensive week of genomics learning often times this short course as we call it includes students as well as professors but this year it was limited to professors for various reasons and it had 33 participants as is on the slide from the range of states and as well as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and they heard from I believe over 20 of our intramural faculty members they had an intensive bioinformatics workshop during the day Eric told him their his life story at one point during the week so all in all they seem to have a very good experience one of the exciting things that happened this year was that the group divided into three different working groups and they worked with one dedicated faculty member before during and after the short course to put together an educational resource that everyone could take home and use in their classrooms during the year and that was a very positive experience both for the intramural investigators that helped them as well as for all of the faculty members to come together a report that came out just about 10 days ago with Michael from ASHG as its first author began looking at the issue of not began was looking at the issue of K-12 genetics education and looking at it with the lens of standards based education as our education system moves more and more towards this standards based measurement and what they found I think not surprisingly to many of us is that the adequacy of the genetics education across the country is really below where we want it to be if we are going to have a citizenry in the future that is able to be an informed partner in the decision making around their health care and listed some of the stats here but this is really all moving towards this concept of genetic literacy and genomic literacy and what exactly does that mean and how can we promote that and the education branch is putting on a workshop again this fall where they are going to work with experts from a variety of fields to look at several different case studies where they have done some community conversations in particular communities around genomics to bring that information from those community conversations back into this two-day workshop and to really examine what we've learned from those conversations and where we need to go going forward if we are to help facilitate and promote a really literate public. Our last branch is the communications and public liaison branch they of course work with the media and with the public and are really the voice of the institute in terms of projecting out our messages they provide the public face to the institute through our website of course but also through our press releases of various research that comes out both intramurally and extramurally and recently through a partnership with the policy branch have started taking those pieces of research news and trying to package them and make them accessible to the general public by writing more lay friendly, lay language versions of these research updates and putting them out and again Eric has updated you in the past on these genome advances that began in February and these are the advances that have come out since that time looking in May at the using genomic strategies for public health problem around the E. coli outbreak in Germany then taking on whole genome sequencing for individual clinical care with the case from Baylor where whole genome sequencing was used in twins to improve their outcomes and then the research discovery from our own intramural program around Proteus that Eric talked about in more detail in his talk. One of the things that's important for us to do beyond our press releases and our standard web pages is to begin trying to market our messages and our stories to an increasing sector of the public and to disseminate NHGRI news and other news from genomics in general to as wide a variety as possible so we've been looking for new ways to do that that are interactive and one of the things that we've done is to create a video studio in our office suite so we've taken a regular office and converted it to a green screen room and this is a picture from the first time that we used this where Jim can have an exciting story on Neanderthal evolution and this is a control room which is a few offices down the hall where we can put the magic together and make it look like Jim is talking in his lab. If you go back and and look here actually you see that Elvro our video technician on one of the things I think it's his model C but he's actually now making it look like Eric is in Africa for something recent for the H3 Africa meeting that's coming up that Eric can't attend so we're trying to use this as much as we can and to again make sure that we have story ready and ready to go for any media outlet that might want to use it and also we are putting it on YouTube again trying to reach out to our audiences where they are YouTube has a much larger number of unique visitors than our website does and so we have over 180 videos posted at this point on YouTube which are getting a large number of hips and as you can see we did a tele-briefing on the Proteus story that came out a few months ago and we put the video of that tele-briefing up on YouTube so that people could go and watch it as well. We're also moving into social media now and so we have a presence on Facebook we started with DNA Day in 2009 and now we have a genome page that was launched just a few months ago at this point we're starting to pick up a following so we have 567 likes for genome and more than 4,000 for DNA Day since both conversations run throughout the year so we really use DNA Day as an ongoing conversation with the student community and you can see, well you can't see but what's shown on here is some discussion about the recent ASH paper from Mike Darity at ASHG that map that's shown up there is the one that shows which states are adequate and not adequate in terms of their genetic standards and there's some conversation from someone in Kansas talking about what her experience was and then from the NHGRI page there's someone asking how to get access to certain data and our communication staff responding to them pointing them in the right direction so this is being helpful and we hope it will become more and more utilized and something that we can use we put all of our stories now up on Facebook and Google are using Twitter to try and get the news out about what's happening again we have a Twitter feed for both DNA Day and for NHGRI current stats just in terms of what's happening recently we posted a video from Betty Graham giving a talk about how to obtain a grant and if I remember my stats right which I'm not going to believe it had over 500 hits in the last few weeks and also the news about Mark's appointment and Jim Mulligan's appointment had about 200 hits going forward so this we're actually finding is getting us more at least equivalent if not more coverage than our traditional press releases would and we're getting it out to a variety of audiences and so the dissemination is much broader than our traditional pathways so this brings us back then to what we're trying to do where we're using again the research as the base for everything that we do in terms of policy and outreach engaging in dialogue with you all with other members of the community to find out what's important where the challenges are how we can be helpful what we need to address in our day to day jobs and really this comes down then to finding the different issues as they come up where the opportunities where are the needs so that we can make sure that genomics research can go forward and bring about all the benefit and potential that we know that it has and with that I will stop and just put up all of my staff again since it's really all of them that do the work and several of the slides so thank you. Questions for Laura? Laura it's my understanding that genomics at CDC is being scaled back or has been substantially scaled back are there is there any possibility that some of the activities that they were involved in like EGAP I don't know what's going to happen to those activities and whether your office would become more involved in any of those things? So we met with Muin at least once in the spring after news of this came forward to talk about what was happening and what he thought was going to happen to the programs that he had currently funded into those that he was trying to start I know he was also doing those same kinds of visits with other institutes and with other parts of the genomics community there's actually a meeting on Wednesday to talk about the future of public health genomics there was a request for information with several questions put out to the community at large for public comment and there are four or five of us going to that meeting on Wednesday to listen to the discussion and participate in the discussion so we can answer just your question going forward. Laura thanks so much a question I have is using the advanced notice of proposed rulemaking as an example which is going to have huge ramifications for researchers saying that all tissues are identifiable this concept of a consent how do we track that a lot of issues does your office as part of its role to sort of get out to your investigators these are potential impacts of this for genetic researchers or are you too close to the people who wrote it that you can't do that because what we're here we're having a really hard time getting our investigators engaged all of the here is less bureaucracy let's go for it but then you say who's going to get these consents and who's going to track it it's the other what ifs but does your office have a role in that I think my office has a role in that I personally have a great interest in many of the questions that are coming out of that we will not comment officially on the ANPRM or on other iterations as it has come forward in terms of a public perspective we've already commented on the draft before it went out internally and will continue to be involved there's a committee set up for NIH with all of the institutes represented to inform building one as this conversation goes forward but from the perspective of talking to the investigators I think that's fundamental to what we're doing and for us to be able to do our job well we're having a conversation I'm putting together a panel on this at the LC Sears PI meeting it's been two weeks to talk to that group about it I'm also hoping that down the road there are consortia which you all are going to talk about in closed session around our new sequencing programs and our new sequencing RFAs and I'm hoping that again those will be groups that we can go to interact with around what exactly are the issues as this conversation goes forward because the ANPRM as you know is going to take a long time to move forward and there will probably be several iterations for the investigators and their institutions because as you said a lot of times it may be the institutions that are engaged more in these regulatory discussions going forward okay they're going to go up on the web well on their site or maybe they're going to have a public website both I guess yes you have accessed all these slides I hope people I'm going to add a couple of comments first of all I hope by seeing this presentation I appreciate the breath of things that Laura and her team are responsible for I mean it's just sometimes mind-boggling how many different responsibilities fall within it it also therefore is not surprising that this is a lot of effort often times Laura and I are exchanging email like 4.30 and 5.00 in the morning kind of thing because there's so many things that all these things relate to that require our attention one thing I would drill down a little bit more and point out because Laura this whole thing about these YouTube postings and this commitment to video as a modality for outreach if you will I really have been struck when I've traveled internationally and all this stuff goes up on YouTube occasionally I hear people look at it when I travel internationally I can think just in the last year to South America to Africa and then to India I was struck at how many people come up to me and talk to me about the various things they're watching on YouTube so while they may not have access to a lot of seminar speakers in genomics or experts that feel to come through their particular institutions not only is it stuff that we're putting up from the green room and the stuff that we're making specifically for posting but we're trying to take a lot of our symposium and our lecture series and our tutorials and increasingly put them up as well as an outreach and they really are appreciated by folks around the world and they're watching them so I think that's the justification for the advancement we're making for that. Yeah. I just had an interesting question in the media world at large how is it perceived and I'm assuming this must be done all over the place for a presentation or a report or whatever it is coming from a center that it's not coming from a site that it's not actually at in other words you're using the green room but it's in the lab or it's in Africa or something like that and just watching this how do they perceive that they don't know? I think it happens all the time on the news that we watch and you know where we go just simply because people can't travel to where they need to be and so they'll look like they're in Washington and they might be somewhere else. Does that need to in any way be noted by Larry our communications director Larry's coming to the microphone we don't go to extremes for example during the hurricane I wanted to do a thing where they were going to be blowing water they wouldn't let me do it but go ahead Larry well it would have wrecked the equipment so you know that was totally out I mean is your question actually about will people perceive that they're being fooled by where the person is so certainly our intention is not to fool anybody and I don't and most of the time when you know a person is not in the location we make it fairly obvious that this is intended to be a pretty picture and it's visual and it's not intended to be tricking you the stuff with the lab that was actually Jim's lab and it was more the green room has been set up the green screen studio has been set up to make it efficient essentially so we try to make it as realistic as possible and as authentic as possible but we're not but we're also a very small group and it takes a lot of effort to do video so it's much easier to have the camera stationary bringing the people sit them in a place and put up a photograph behind them and we're going to be doing that with some you know regularity but it's we'll be experimenting with it and I hear the question that you're asking there is a balance between being extremely concrete and being you know and and lying and we're going to definitely stay away from the lying side but not always be concrete and that sometimes we'll just be putting a pretty pictures and you'll be able to tell it's a pretty picture not necessarily where the guy was or the gal was just a brief follow-up but journalists have been fired for this you know journalists I'm a former journalist and I'm a former broadcaster and we use green screen all the time I've done so many stand-ups in front of the capital building when the capital building was not behind me and I was standing in a studio and nobody is fooled by that everybody knows that it's just that you're in a studio so I'm not a journalist and I never was but I have to say that you know having Jim's lab behind him I find fairly benign but having a lot of Africa we should clarify this it's a graphic it is not portraying me or anyone it was just simply it was decoration it was just simply blank wall it didn't portray me to be somewhere I was not it was just to bring in the theme of where this was going to show that I think it's like a website the h3africa website behind me then I don't think any of us would object to that this is not a misleading this is more of like dramatic there might have been but I haven't seen that part of the clip it's actually an interesting cultural question and maybe something that we'll need to sort of sort out as we go through with this but over the years I've kind of recognized that my scientific colleagues are extremely concrete and what they see is exactly what they believe is actually there and on the artistic side you do some interpretation of this kind of stuff so there may be some issue with where that comfort zone comes and we will certainly welcome input and feedback about that and I'm sure we'll get some okay thank you we're not losing it wait 3D yet but that's coming okay thank you Laura


Hey, Aloha, and welcome to Stand Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Sam Osterman, coming to you live and direct from the beautiful metropolis of Kailua, Hawaii on the windward side of Oahu. And for those of you that haven't started making your plans to visit Hawaii, it's never too late.  But other than that, the weather is beautiful, the surf's looking good, especially on the south shore. Come on out and visit Hawaii. Anyway, we've got a great show today. I'm going to start off with some good news. If we enroll that picture, we delivered our first Toyota fuel cell vehicle to the big island of Hawaii. It's a Toyota Mirai right here, still covered in encrusted in salt courtesy of young brothers. It was delivered to Kauai Harbor on the big island, and that's Paul Pontio from Blue Planet Research using his Millennium Rain fueling station to put some hydrogen in the car. And he's been driving it around, washed it up, cleaned it up really good. It's looking beautiful. So now we have a hydrogen fuel cell car in the big island for folks to try out when they go up to visit Paul at the ranch there at Blue Planet Research. So thanks to everybody who helped get that together. And today's show, we're going back to visit an organization that I interviewed 2019, about middle of 2019, as I recall. And it's one of my favorite utilities here in Hawaii because it's a co-op. And it's the only co-op that I know of that does electricity in the state and is independent of Hawaiian Electric and their operations. They're also really well-established, not only locally, but they've got a great reputation nationally. And they're doing some pretty innovative and some pretty advanced things with their intermittent renewables, solar and wind and things like that. So the guest today is Mr. Brad Rockwell. He's running operations over at Kauai Island Utility Co-op. And welcome, Brad. Good to have you on board today. Hey, thank you, Stan. Good to be here. Yeah, it's been a while. It has a couple of years and things of, I guess, you know, with COVID and everything that's keeping us keeping things interesting over here in the electricity business. I bet. Well, why don't we start off by giving the audience a little bit of background on yourself and what you do at KAC? Sure, yeah. As you said, I'm Chief of Operations, so I oversee our generation, transmission, distribution, basically keeping the lights on and grid operations and also our renewable development, our IT department, our planners.  Spent a lot of my career in developing our renewable projects here on the island of Kauai, extremely proud of the fact that we've gone from 8 percent renewable about 11 years ago in 2010 to 67 percent for 2020. So we've been on a very aggressive push to get toward the 100 percent renewable and been pretty successful along the way. Learned some lessons as well. My background is as a mechanical engineer, always been in power generation. On the civilian side of my career, did some time in the Navy as well, active duty and in the reserve. So I've been here with the co-op. We've been here on Kauai since 2001, the co-op formed in late 2002. And I became a part of that shortly after they formed through an acquisition they bought the power plant I was working at. So I don't know if the audience appreciates this, but most utility grids can't handle even 20 percent intermittent renewables on their grid. And you say you're up in the high 60 percent. 67 percent renewables, that includes our firm renewables, if you will, our biomass and hydro as well as the solar. And that's on an annual basis on an instantaneous basis. We actually routinely exceed 80 percent from intermittent renewables, the solar. That's a lot of that is backed up with battery storage. And when you add in the biomass and the hydro, we're routinely hitting 100 percent renewable where we're not burning a single drop of oil for multiple hours at a time on sunny days here. That's that's really impressive. On the spinning reserve side, is that where you do you still have to run a diesel for spinning reserve? So, yeah, we if we if we're running 100 percent renewable, we're going to be keeping one of our conventional units operating in what we call a synchronous condenser mode. It's not consuming any fuel, but we're rotating the generator to provide inertia, that rotating mass, which helps us with keeping frequency stable. It also provides some voltage support, some dynamic voltage support and and also provide fault current, which is something that we use. All electric grids used to provide protection across the electric grid when there's a fault like a power line that comes down, it causes an overcurrent and our relays, our protection devices, sense that overcurrent. But that overcurrent can only exist if there's devices on the system to provide that high current like this synchronous condenser generator that we operate when we're running 100 percent renewable. That's that's a really good explanation. I haven't heard too many people talk about that that aspect. You know, recently, can you see was recognized by a national organization for basically a lot of what you just talked about? Can you kind of tell us a little bit about that? Sure. Yeah, we're really proud. We've been it was the Smart Electric Power Alliance, or CEPA, as they're known, and it's a national organization that is really focused on renewable energy and smart electric grid type solutions. We've been a part of a member of them for a decade or more. We've received a number of awards for, you know, solar installed per capita, storage installed per capita and things like that. But this was this is really nice to be recognized for sort of all of the above everything we've been doing and to be recognized as the electric cooperative of the year. They do they announce investor own utility of the year, municipality of the year and electric cooperative of the year. And we we kind of got it for our renewable portfolio standards that, like I mentioned, the 67 percent on an annual basis and also for the being able to operate at 100 percent at any one time, as well as some of our projects, some of our really innovative solar and storage projects and our pumped hydro project that we're working to bring online. So yeah, I'm happy to get into any of those details, but it was really sort of a recognition of all of the things we've been working on and have achieved. When I read the article, I was really impressed. And I think I even wrote a comment I saw it in Pacific Business News and I wrote a comment back to the newspaper saying this is really a great accomplishment for a small local local company to get that kind of recognition, especially for what you did. I mean, again, I got to emphasize that they have that much renewable on the grid, especially at times 100 percent production and so much of it being solar. That's no small feat. And I I'd venture to say even Hawaii Electric is probably pretty damn jealous of of KAC right now, because I don't think they could come close to doing that. They have a bigger grid, of course, and a lot more complex issues. But, you know, still you guys have stepped out where very few utilities have gone. Let's talk a little bit about the solar side of that, about what percentage of your generation is solar in terms of I know you say at times you run 100 percent solar, but in terms of what you average use average and how much of your grid you kind of count on for solar on a daily basis. You know, how many how many kilowatts or megawatts do you generate? Yeah, I mean, you know, depending on how you slice it, if we look at an annual basis, we're getting about 40 percent of our energy from solar. And so it's just eclipsed. It's just become the number one provider. You know, our four sources on this island are solar, small hydro, biomass and oil, of course. So solar is now the predominant form. Oil is second at around 33 percent. And then we've got biomass and hydro. So on an annual basis, about 40, like I said, it's an instantaneous basis. If you look at those times, we're running 100 percent renewable. We can hit as much as 80 percent coming from solar. And like I said, a lot of that is backed up with battery storage. So, yeah, and then, of course, at night, we're getting, you know, nothing from solar. We're still getting some from our battery. So it's it's it varies quite a bit. But is is most of that solar going to battery? I would say about probably about half of it is have the numbers in front of me. But we have, you know, our island all time peak demand is 80 megawatts. We set that in the summer of 2019. And and if you look at how much solar capacity we have installed, it's well over 100 megawatts. So clearly, you know, on an islanded grid where we don't have a connection to any place else, we have to always keep things in balance. And so, you know, we can't clearly take 100 megawatts of solar if our all time peak demand is only 80. So a lot of that has to be stored in batteries that we can then use later on at night when we don't have the standalone solar competing for the time. And you mentioned biomass. Could you describe that system? You know, what is it a gasifier or what exactly are you running? No, it's a conventional boiler, a traveling great boiler. So it's a unique project in its own right. It's a closed loop biomass plant. So they have their own plantation of eucalyptus trees that they're growing and roughly 3,000 acres. And then they're continuously harvesting those trees and chipping them up. And then they they, you know, haul the wood chips from the field to the power plant. They they put them on into a sort of a fuel hall. And then that goes over to the boiler where it's combusted and generates a steam, high pressure, high temperature steam that drives the steam turbine generator. Right. Is is that similar to the technology that what is it on the Big Island Honua Ola is going to be used? I think it is. Yeah, I don't know too much. I haven't seen, you know, the specifics of Honua Ola, but I think it would work essentially the same. Yeah, what did they do for carbon capture in that process? You know, there is no specific carbon capture. They do have, you know, rubbers, emission control equipment. Yeah, to meet to meet their air permit requirements.  Right, right. So yeah, they're they're using the trees to collect carbon. Right. And and then they put some of it back in. And OK, that's kind of a net neutral. So how about your in stream hydro that you've got? No, you know, I'm actually really intrigued with in stream hydro been exposed to a little bit on the big island. But I just can't imagine if we if we took the time to refurbish some of our old blooms from sugar plantations and pineapple, why we couldn't do some small scale in stream hydro that would add up to a lot of electricity over time, because basically got water running downhill all the time, you know, and right now it's just running downhill. And if you could put some generators in that stream along the way, it could actually generate overall quite a bit of electricity. What's your experience with in stream hydro over at Kauai? Yeah, we I mean, I think there is some untapped potential. We we have a number of sugar plantation era in stream hydro plants that operate, continue to provide a valuable contribution to our renewable portfolio standards. And we're also looking to develop or in development on a new in stream hydro combined with solar PV that's going to use that solar energy to pump water uphill between two existing reservoirs that need to be refurbished. So we're going to instead of using battery, chemical batteries to store this solar energy, we're now going to use more conventional, you know, water reservoirs and pump that water uphill about 1500 feet. And then we'll run it down in a new modern, you know, hydro turbine generator. Well, you have a catchment system at the bottom. So when you're pumping, you basically just recirculate recirculating the water between two reservoirs where when you have excess energy, you're pumping water up hill. And then when you need energy, you let the water run through your turbine and you generate power, which is really a great long term energy storage option. Especially if you have the space to put in a really big reservoir and pump from a really big reservoir, you can start quite a bit of energy. So about what percentage does that system take up on your on your grid right now? Well, if that project is successful and coming online, it will amount to about between 20 to 25 percent of our annual energy. And like I said, there's a hydro component of it and there's solar components. So most of the energy will actually be coming from the solar, which we then just, you know, either send some direct to grid. But most of that will be used to pump water up hill and then come back down through the hydro turbine. So I think we count that as we probably will count that as solar energy, even though it's coming to the grid via hydro turbine because it's really produced. It's created by solar panels. That initial energy to pump it up a hill came from the solar panel. So I agree with you. I know last time we talked, I kind of hit you with my favorite subject, which we started this show up with, which is hydrogen. And and actually, even though I was disappointed that you guys weren't using it, I thought your explanation of why the utilities haven't really kind of gotten into hydrogen for larger scale energy storage was really probably explained best by you compared to any of the other utilities I've talked to. And that's just that the technology is still growing, still becoming more cost effective, still not in mainstream use on the grid. But I noticed that in San Diego, there is finally a utility that's going to be using hydrogen for energy storage. Has KIUC thought about that at all, at least maybe even considered it for future use? Yeah, I think I think we think about. I mean, I know I personally do as the guy who's kind of responsible to figure out where our, you know, power needs are going to come from in five, 10, 20 years from now, you know, at some point. And we can continue to do solar and storage in this pumped storage hydro. And but, you know, what else is out there? We're not going to be able to build those types of renewables to get us to 100 percent. We're going to need our existing conventional generating units to probably handle that last five to 10 percent, just because, you know, the contingency situation of a week of clouds where you don't get solar energy or something like that. It's going to always be there. And, you know, we need to be able to provide the power. So those conventional generating units might be powered with a liquid biodiesel, which is renewable or it could be hydrogen. You know, we've got a number of gas turbines. Our GELM 2500 is our single largest generating unit here. It could set up to run on gaseous fuels. You know, you could run a mix of hydrogen or maybe even pure hydrogen. Oh, geez, done some tests on that. And and we're kind of keeping our finger on the pulse of that. But I mean, a gaseous, a renewable gaseous fuel is definitely of interest to us. And especially where we might be able to create that fuel ourselves by using otherwise curtailed solar PV energy to run an electrolyzer and then, you know, store that hydrogen that we can then use on demand. The key to getting to 100 percent renewable grid is going to be long duration storage, whether it's this pump storage project we're talking about or having a tank of hydrogen or tanks of biodiesel. You need you need more than what battery technology can provide, which is, you know, just a few hours. We need days of storage if we're going to really do 100 percent. I think people really don't appreciate the amount of energy in a barrel of oil or, you know, a couple of gallons of diesel fuel, or it's it's rather energy dense. And, you know, when you think about how much energy we actually consume over a 24 hour period and then translate that into OK, how much solar do we need that only runs five, six hours a day in terms of rated capacity up the solar panels? You know, we've got to store an awful lot of energy to have that two or three weeks of backup that right now oil provides without even thinking about, but when it comes to renewables, we're going to have to be, you know, resilient enough to operate several weeks potentially on some kind of other stored energy. And batteries certainly are great for the quick quick response in the hours. But for days and weeks, it's probably not the best option. Your pumped hydro storage is actually kind of in the same category with hydrogen for long term storage. What kind of compared to batteries? What is a project like that cost compared to batteries over a long term, like 20, 30 years? It's pretty comparable of where we've put out that the the average cost of energy from that project will be about 15 cents a kilowatt hour. And when you consider the long duration storage, we get from it and the firm capacity contributions from it. We think it is on par with slightly cheaper solar and chemical battery storage projects, which, you know, we've done in the 11 cents per kilowatt hour range. But I think more recently, they've been around 12 cents and things like that. So this is a unique project that aside from the benefits that provides the electric grid, there's some wonderful community benefits as well. It's going to be bringing water over to Department of Wine homelands. So they have irrigation, the ability to use irrigation water and to allow their pastoral lessees to use that water to do some farming and ranching on some lands that are pretty arid right now and don't have any sort of infrastructure. We're going to improve the road access so people have roads and have the ability to get electricity up there and things like that. So it provides some nice benefits to Department of Wine homelands as well as taking care of some damn liability issues for Department of Land and Natural Resources and also helping the Agriculture Business Development Corporation and Kaka Ag Association and their agricultural pursuits. Would you say that that aspect, the collateral benefits to agriculture and things is maybe one of the strengths of KAUC as a utility? That you're able to actually assist other communities and other industries like agriculture to meet their goals? Would you would you consider that to be one of the real keystones to your operation? Well, it's the strength of KAUC in general. We have seven cooperative principles and one of those is concern for a community. So we're always focused on the community and what's nice about the electric co-op structure is we don't have shareholders per se. We have our ratepayers, our shareholders. So we're completely aligned with our constituents, the ratepayers and what their needs are. So we want to do whatever is going to benefit our community and we don't have sort of external interests that are pulling at us that we need to try to satisfy.  I mean, I think so. That's a broad question. There's always people who aren't too happy with their electric company. I don't care where you are. I hear you. But, you know, we've done member surveys every year for many, many years now and the results are getting better. We think for the most part, the fact that we've been so successful in renewables, which I think all of our members appreciate and the fact that that has translated into very stable and lower electric rates, especially when you consider inflation, has been appreciated by our membership. And the fact that they have a voice, you know, they the board of directors who we have nine board of directors that are elected by the ratepayers. They're all, you know, leaders in the community. Our members have a voice to reach out to them. And they're the ones who set, you know, the strategic direction and they provide the governance. They hire and fire our CEO, my boss. And so they have a real tangible control of, you know, the electric future of this island. So, you know, that that actually is a microcosm of what I think could be fixing our country right now is, you know, we're supposed to be up by and for the people. Well, when you're running a co-op, your customers basically are the people that vote you in and out of office. So to speak, as you said, with your CEO being on the cutting cutting table, if everybody's not happy with them. So I'd say you guys have a really great model and I'm really thrilled to be able to talk to you and, you know, get some insight on what you're doing and hear about your success and your ongoing success. So we've got a couple of minutes left. Can you tell us anything that, you know, that you can? I'm sure a lot of us close hold on what KAUC is doing to go into the future and maybe even make things better. I think we're I mean, we're looking at using technology in a number of ways. You know, we've talked enough about renewables, so I won't go there. But trying to improve reliability, you know, over here on the Garden Island, it's probably no surprise that we have, you know, trees that contact our lines and, you know, keeping the growth in check in our rights away or can be challenging. So we're looking into things like satellite, advanced satellite technology that might be more efficient than sending people around to look at where we, you know, our rights of way are getting encroached and in satellites that can look at both horizontal and vertical, you know, where is this growth starting to creep up a little too close to our line so we can be more proactive about it. We've also got an amazing automated metering infrastructure system. So essentially the whole island, about 95% of our customers, our members have smart meters. So we're able to do a lot of things with that. We know when the powers out for our members before they do in many cases and we can roll a truck to fix it before they ever have to call us. We can give them notifications about it. So that's pretty amazing. Our customers can see their energy use on a 15 minute interval. So there's some great things like that. We're looking to do some more with cybersecurity, which is of course on everyone's mind making sure that we're not a victim of some sort of an attack and that that impacts, you know, everyone on the island relies on us doing our job well and doing it right. So we need to make sure that we're always there for them. Great.  Or is that a little bit too far down the road yet? No, we have. I mean, we're looking at one of the challenges is providing reliable power to the North Shore here. We've got the transmission line that goes over the mountains and we tried many years to go to run one along the coast and that sort of got stopped and we weren't able to complete that line. And so we're looking at, does it make sense to build a redundant line up there or maybe just do some sort of a micro grid capability up there? Land is, you know, space is pretty tight up there so it can be a little challenging. We have some experience with micro grid for the Pacific Missile Range Facility. We just finished within the last year we brought online a new solar and storage project out there that has the ability of island at the base loads if there is a problem with the grid. So that's exciting. That's being done completely with that solar and battery project and no conventional generation. So we've got a little bit of experience there and hopefully we can leverage that for some other areas that make sense. Great. Well, believe it or not, Brad, we've kind of ripped through 30 minutes and we got a lot covered and I learned a lot of new stuff too. And again, really proud of what you guys are doing over there. You're doing a great job. And I hope that a lot of other utilities can learn from you. So keep up the good work. And if you don't mind, we'll get back with you in another few months, probably not as long as it took since the last interview and we'll catch up with K.I.U.C. again. Will that be okay? Sure, no problem, Stan. Thanks and keep up the good work with the show. All right, thanks, Brad. Take care and we'll see you next week on Stan the Energy Man. Aloha.


This emergency alert is from the SCP Foundation, the Global Occult Coalition, and the United States Paranatural Warfare Command. A dangerous anomaly called the Deer is approaching your area, and you must evacuate immediately. The Deer has the appearance of a giant deer, with a human face, and giant hovering antlers. This creature can manipulate reality and the atomic composition of any item or individual. It has a preference for transforming humans, and obstacles into gaseous clouds, or metallic hydrogen, and helium. It is hostile to humans, and no means have been discovered to harm the entity in any way. Cooperate with local law enforcement, and the organization mentioned previously, to facilitate rapid evacuation. The SCP Foundation, Global Occult Coalition, and U.S. Paranatural Warfare Command will have the anomaly contained soon.