Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Today is our briefing, Energy Earth Shots, the Frontier of Climate Innovation. I'm Dan Berset. I'm the president of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. And I'd like to start by thanking Representative Paul Tonko and the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition for helping us with the room today. It's always really, really great to work with that office. Would you believe that ESI is celebrating 40 years of advancing climate solutions through Congressional education? ESI was founded in 1984 by a bipartisan group of members of Congress and has since then worked to provide science-based information about environmental policy, energy policy, and climate change topics to policymakers and the public. We also, over time, have developed some expertise helping utilities and rural areas access Department of Agriculture funding and financing resources. What congressional education means to ESI is a lot, but it's mostly briefings. We do a lot of briefings. Briefings every couple of weeks. We're up here on the Hill bringing the best information we can to congressional staff to help them keep up to date with everything happening in climate policy. Two weeks ago, we were in this room to talk about the Fifth National Climate Assessment. We'll be back up in a few weeks to talk about innovations in weather forecasting, the appropriations in budget process, ocean carbon dioxide removal, and even more. Everything is always available online and free of charge. And you can sign up for our newsletter and access all of our briefings to date by visiting us at www.esi.org. We try really hard. We understand what it's like to be a congressional staff person. We understand what it's like to have your boss show up late on an afternoon before they take off, I say, asking hard questions about climate policy. What's this mean? What's this energy earth shot all about? Well, I would really appreciate it if when you Google energy earth shots, you also Google ESI, because that will bring you to this resource. And with this tremendous panel and our tremendous keynote speaker, we want our resources to be timely, relevant, accessible, and practical. And we put a lot of thought into that. For example, when we start to get firm bill text, which will happen at some point in the future, we actually have almost two dozen side-by-side comparison charts standing by to help congressional staff very quickly compare what the House is proposing and what the Senate is proposing. Our newest resource was just blasted today. My colleague Molly's been working very, very hard on our fossil fuel subsidies fact sheet and it addresses proposals in Congress as well as the President's budget request to repeal over a dozen fossil fuel subsidies. That's actually on the front table as well. It's much better for you to have this information before you need it, and we know that. And you can count on us to help. The Department of Energy does a lot of great stuff. And we've been extremely fortunate over the years to work with our friends at the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy on briefings, articles, and podcasts about the earth shot initiative and other programs. The Department of Energy, and I'm talking about the entire agency from ERE to the Office of State and Community Energy Programs to the Office of Science to the offices of the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary and the Undersecretaries is on the vanguard of innovation and now more than ever also on the vanguard of the deployment of technologies and programs that are absolutely essential to our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2030. And that brings us to today. We're going to be talking about DOE's energy earth shots. These are designed to rapidly break down market barriers and scale up innovation in eight key sectors to address the climate crisis. That includes enhanced geothermal energy and floating offshore wind. It includes low carbon industrial heat and affordable home energy. These earth shots set ambitious goals to tackle the critical energy challenges of our time. Now I'm going to turn it over via video remarks to one of our friends on the House Science Committee, Chairman Frank Lucas. Representative Frank Lucas represents the third district of Oklahoma. He chairs the Science Space and Technology Committee. And he's committed to ensuring that the United States harness American innovation in energy efficiency and effectiveness, support research and basic science labs, improve access to STEM education while building the STEM workforce and maintaining American global leadership and space exploration. Representative Lucas also serves on the committees on agriculture and financial services. My colleague, Dan L, will come up in just a moment and we'll get a chance to hear what Representative Lucas has to say. Thank you. Hi, I'm Frank Lucas, Chairman of the Science, Space and Technology Committee. And I want to thank the EESI for inviting me today to speak about geothermal energy, a topic of particular interest to myself and the Science Committee. All of you in attendance today know that advanced thermal technologies have the potential to transform the US energy sector. Geothermal is no doubt a source of clean and renewable energy that is always on. Although the United States leads the world in geothermal power production, geothermal still contributes less than 1% of the total utility scale US electric generation capacity. While I've seen the value of geothermal energy in my district with Oklahoma's thriving geothermal heat pumps industry, more work needs to be done to allow the rest of the country to access the full power of this resource. Federally funded research programs at the Department of Energy have a history of paving the way for industry innovation. That's why three years ago, the Science Committee worked to get my bill the Advanced Geothermal Research and Development Act signed into law as a part of the Bipartisan Energy Act of 2020. This legislation provided DOE with a comprehensive reauthorization of its geothermal technologies or in deactivities, directing DOE to partner with industry and academia to improve the next generation of geothermal energy systems. Meaningful collaboration between industry and agencies has been a priority of mine as chairman. And I'm grateful that organizations like the EESI that help facilitate good collaboration, again. Thank you all for inviting me to speak today. It's an honor to be a part of a conversation that will be fundamental to our nation's energy security. It's Representative Debra Ross. Before I introduce Representative Ross, I'd like to thank Representative Lucas and his great staff. We worked with his office a couple years ago on a weather forecasting briefing as well. And it's always really fun to work with the folks in the Science Committee. And I'm really glad he mentioned the Energy Act of 2020. I feel like that's often forgotten in the wake of the Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction Act. But it gave DOE a lot of new authorities and improved a lot of existing efforts there. Thanks for that mention, Representative Lucas. We're also gonna be hearing today from Representative Debra Ross. Representative Ross is a civil rights advocate, a clean energy champion, a lawyer, and a proud North Carolinian. She is serving her second term representing North Carolina's Second Congressional District, which includes most of Wake County. Representative Ross serves on the House Committee on Space Science and Technology, the House Judiciary Committee, the House Ethics Committee, and the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. She is also a member of the House Democrats Leadership Team, serving as Chief Deputy WIP and on the Steering and Policy Committee. Thank you, Representative Ross, for joining us today. And we'll hear what you have to say. Thank you. Thank you, Dan, for that kind introduction. And thank you to the Environmental and Energy Study Initiative and the Department of Energy for hosting this important discussion. My home state of North Carolina is all too familiar with the devastating effects of climate change. From increasingly frequent and severe hurricanes to extreme heat and wildfires, we're already experiencing the impacts of climate change. Clearly, we need to do more to combat the climate crisis and research and investment into clean energy solutions are some of the best options in our toolbox. And meeting DOE's Earth Shots Initiative will require congressional support. It requires significant investments in research, development and deployment of innovative clean energy technologies. I'm proud of the work that we've already done in Congress to help us meet our climate goals. I'm a firm believer that investing in clean energy technology is one of the best resources we have to combat climate change. In Congress, I've championed the development of North Carolina's offshore wind energy potential. My legislation to overturn the 10-year moratorium on offshore wind leasing off of the coast of North Carolina and other states in the Southeast was signed into law in the Historic Inflation Reduction Act. My state has seen the ambitious goals for offshore wind energy and development. We've set them and we're on our way to meeting them. We'll continue to work to meet those goals as well as President Biden's ambitious national goals including by harnessing the capabilities of floating offshore wind technology. The Floating Offshore Wind Shot Initiative is a crucial step toward shaping a sustainable and clean energy future. It seeks to reduce the cost of floating offshore wind energy by more than 70% by 2035. Achieving these goals will drive down energy costs for ratepayers, create thousands of jobs and establish the US as a leader in design, development and manufacturing in a new industry. By harnessing the potential of offshore wind energy, the United States can be a leader in the global transition to a clean and sustainable energy future. This is just one of the EarthShot initiatives that will help us overcome any challenges to achieve our ambitious climate goals. Climate change is something that we cannot postpone and the fight against it is one that we intend to win. So we need to start working today. We must invest in the research today to create the clean energy economy of tomorrow. I'm grateful to the Department of Energy for its work on this issue and I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today. Thank you so much. And now I'll turn it over for remarks to Deputy Secretary of Energy, David Turk. As Representative Ross said, we are joined today by a very special guest. David Turk is the Deputy Secretary of Energy. Prior to his nomination as Deputy Secretary, David was the Deputy Executive Director of the International Energy Agency where he focused on helping countries around the world tackle their clean energy transitions. During the Obama-Biden administration, David coordinated international technology and clean energy efforts at the Department of Energy. And during this time, he helped spearhead the launch of Mission Innovation, a global effort to enhance clean energy innovation. David also served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director at the U.S. National Security Council and earlier in his career, he worked in both the U.S. Senate and as the Staff Director of the National Security Subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee. It's my pleasure to welcome David Turk, the Deputy Secretary of Energy to our briefing today. Thank you. We'll pick this up for you. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Dan. Thank you so much. Hey, everybody. Let me just start, Dan, with a thank you to you and all our staff from EESI for not only this briefing, but all that you do to try to make sure we're all informed by what's going on and we can all improve and up our game going forward. Certainly want to express a thanks to Chairman Lucas trying to get in there twice, but that's okay. He's a chairman. If he wants to go twice, he can go twice and to Congressman Ross as well and to Congressman Tonka and his staff for the room just as Mike thanked as well. And I want to thank you all for not only coming here today and hopefully you'll find this interesting. We've got a phenomenal panel, so I'm going to try to keep my part as short as possible because I know you're going to learn an awful lot from our panel and happy to take some questions before I leave as well. But I want to thank you even more importantly and more person to person for your public service. I had a chance, as Mike said, as Dan said, to work here in the Senate and the House. In fact, I worked a couple floors down here in the Rayburn building earlier in my career. And I'm a big fan of public service, whether it's in the legislative branch, whether it's the executive branch, judicial branch in government, local government, state government, folks probably in this room could be earning a lot more, maybe working even less and just appreciate your interest to try to be part of our democracy, part of our process to make laws to improve the way we're doing things going forward. So thank you for that public service from everyone here and those folks virtually as well. Let me just give you a little bit of context for the earth shots and what we're trying to do here. We are making some progress on climate change, but we have to keep in mind about how stark the math is and how much we have to do, right? Our president, rightfully so, in my opinion, has put on the table a net zero goal by 2050. 2050 for some of those who maybe are a little bit younger, seems like an awful long time in the future for others of us. Maybe Dan and I had air at some point, I think, when we were younger, maybe that seemed like a long time, but that's 26 years. 26 years is not that long, certainly in the span of what we need to do in that 26 period of time. Net zero means we not only have to clean up our electricity and get the net zero on electricity, that's the sector where we're making the most progress, not only domestically but internationally as well, but we also have to reduce and get the net zero in transportation. That's the highest sector for our emissions right now in the U.S., but it's not just electricity and transportation, it's industry, it's buildings, you name it, we've got to somehow get to net zero in a couple decade period of time. So how are we doing? There is some good news out there. Our emissions in the U.S. actually went down last year, despite our GDP growing up. We are making significant progress. One of the most interesting pieces of analysis we did when I was part of the International Energy Agency is look across all sectors, all technologies, across all of these areas we need to get to net zero and track which of those technologies are succeeding at a pace and a scale to get us to that net zero, to get us to that 1.5 degree trajectory. It ends up being 50 different technologies in 50 different sectors. Right now the latest numbers are that we are succeeding, we're doing enough at pace and scale in three of those 50 sectors. Now three is a small number, I don't need to tell you all that, but these are significant technologies and significant areas where we are making progress. One of those is solar. Right now in our country 4% of our electricity is produced by solar. Now that is a small number, but it used to be even smaller and we've grown a huge amount just over the last few year period of time. We're also on a trajectory to get to 7% within just a couple years. 4% to 7% just in a couple years, that is the kind of scale of progress, scale of pace that we need to be successful, not just in solar, but across the board as well. One of those other three areas right now is EVs. We are seeing significant progress in penetration of EVs. In our own country the latest numbers, month on month numbers are one out of every 10 of our vehicle sold is an EV or a plug in hybrid. That's quadruple from where we were when this president took over. So 10% again is not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things. We need to do an awful lot better and have a clean electricity grid in order to decarbonize transportation, but going from very low quadrupling to 10% and then increasing even further, we are seeing some of that progress. But what do we need to do about the 47 areas? Lighting is the other one for those who are keeping track of the three of the 53 of the 50. But what are we gonna do about the 47? What are we gonna do about all these other sectors in technology areas where we don't have the price competitiveness where we need to, where we don't have the pace and scale? The bipartisan infrastructure legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, and thanks for all of you who were part of those historic pieces of legislation are giving us a lot more tools in our tool belt to deploy, to build out these technologies in the real world as quickly as we can. But if we're gonna be successful to get to net zero in all of these sectors with all of the technologies we need to, we also need to double down or I'd say even triple down or quadruple down on innovation as well. There's an awful lot more we need to do in our laboratories, we need to do with private sector partners to reduce costs. And when I say reduce costs, I mean dramatically reduce costs. For solar, we had something many years ago, actually not that many years ago, about a decade or so at the Department of Energy called SunShot. So we saw that solar's costs were decreasing, we saw the potential for solar to get to the kinds of penetration we're at now and we'll get to in the future. But the costs weren't there. So we had a goal of reducing costs 75%. We reached that goal three years earlier than we set out to do originally. This was our EERE colleagues of which Carolyn well knows and is a phenomenal leader in that part of our department. So we can do this. The eight earth shots that we've launched now, they're part of a set, they're built off the SunShot model. It's dramatic cost reductions, it's dramatic numbers, they're purposefully bold, we need to be bold if we're gonna do what we need to do within this decade period of time. You heard about a couple of them. I think there's hard copies of this. If not, it's certainly Googleable at our EERE website as part of our DOE. This is our earth shots, it lists all eight. A couple of them were already mentioned. Let me just pick up on a couple of those, in fact, the ones that were mentioned. Enhanced geothermal, such a phenomenal resource as the chair was mentioning. Enhanced geothermal means you don't just get to take advantage of geothermal when it's closer to the surface. You use the phenomenal drilling technology that we've developed in this country. You go deeper, you can do it anywhere if you go deep enough and you just gotta make the costs work on it. So you have 24-7 power. If you can do it and get the economics to work, you have base load power in a phenomenal way all across our country and all across the world. So our goal there is to reduce costs to $45 per megawatt hour. That's not where we're at now. That's about a 90% reduction. But again, we did it for solar. We can do it for enhanced geothermal. We can have that phenomenal resource if we put the investment. If we have the time and talent, we'll work with the private sector going forward. Congresswoman Oros mentioned offshore wind, floating offshore wind in particular. We've got some areas of our coast where we can do traditional offshore wind. We're starting to build that capability out on the east coast. But there are other parts where you actually have a better wind resource where it's deeper. And floating offshore wind is a phenomenal solution. But again, we've gotta drive those costs to where we need to get to. So our floating offshore wind shot has drive down costs again to $45 per megawatt hour. That is a bold goal. That is not where we're at now. That's not even close to where we're at now but we can drive those costs down even further. So these eight earth shots are meant to be bold. They're meant to put targets on the table. They're meant to put plans together. We use them internally in the Department of Energy working with the rest of the government, working with the private sector to all rally around these goals, rally around these efforts, bring our time, talent so that we can achieve these targets and we can have these as the tools in our tool belt to be successful going forward. So it's everything from hydrogen, clean hydrogen, long duration energy storage. We need storage solutions for the longer term, right? 10 or more hours or even daily or weekly storage solutions at cost that allow our grids, that allow all our electricity system to make sense. Carbon negative shot. We need to have carbon removal technologies at scale at the price points where they're affordable in our country. $100 per net metric ton. That's not where we're at right now with carbon negative technologies, but we can get there if we all lean in. Industrial heat, we need to have solutions for the harder to decarbonize sectors, including industry. This is a key part of it, is how do you have industrial heat that's not as greenhouse gas intensive as it is right now? Our goal there is to reduce greenhouse gas intensity, 85% for carbon heat. Clean fuels and products shot and our latest and most recent are affordable home energy shot. A lot of these, of course, are not just saving our planet, that's good, that's necessary, but this is also about reducing costs for everybody, including folks who can least afford it. So this particular shot is aimed at reducing the cost of energy efficient retrofits in affordable homes by 50%. If we can achieve that, that is a big deal. Caroline and her team have been working on that among others going forward. So let me just leave you with this. To be successful on these earth shots, to be successful at getting to net zero is gonna require resources. Fuel in gets fuel out. If we wanna have the kind of experts expertise, the technology platforms, our laboratories, our facilities, we've gotta invest. We've gotta invest in that kind of resource. It's also gonna require an awful lot of partnerships, including and especially with the private sector and entrepreneurs. And we'll get into some great examples of our National Renewable Energy Lab working with partners in the private sector. But it's also gonna require, and I just wanna leave you with this, it's gonna require an awful lot of people making career choices, whether you're in the congressional branch, the executive branch at national labs, entrepreneurs doubling down, getting excited about the opportunities, not being daunted by the challenges, taking that funding, taking those facilities, taking that research and really driving things going forward. So again, thank you for the choices you've made so far. My hope is more and more people get excited about the clean energy space, make careers in it. We achieve these earth shots and we all succeed on these incredibly ambitious goals. All right, with that, let me leave it for some questions. For that, and we do have some time for questions. I don't know what you mean by the hair though. This is by choice, I'm a huge Jason Statham fan. But we do have some time for questions. So I'll look out in the audience. If I see a hand go up, I'll do my best to see you in proper order. To actually get us started, David, we're just barely the beginning of 2024, relatively early in the earth shots initiative. Do you have any thoughts about where you would like to see ourselves or the department maybe in 2025, or maybe closer to the halfway mark? Where would you like to see the progress of earth shots? And what would you like to be able to look back on and say a year from now and say that the department is able to achieve either in all of them or in some of them, or maybe back to you? Yeah, so I think the thing to underscore and emphasize is remember when we were all in school, some of us it may have been a little bit more recent and others it's been a little while, I'll speak for myself. I'll speak for myself, Dan, on that one. There's a tendency sometimes to procrastinate and wait to do the work until you get to the deadline. There is no way we're gonna be successful on net zero by 2050 or achieving any of these ambitious goals in the earth shots if we wait to provide the funding, if we wait to lean in on the talent, if we wait for entrepreneurs to really jump into this area. So we need to front load everything because these are so ambitious, because these are so audacious goals on that front. So every day that goes by that we're not making tangible progress and we have metrics and we're tracking our progress to make sure we stay on track, get on track. That's what we do at the Department of Energy.  So what I'd like to see is us overachieving as quickly as we can, as early as we can because these are so difficult. And any year that goes by that we're not making substantial progress on any of these, especially the cost reduction piece is lost time and we just don't have time to spare it all. I'll look out and see if I see it again, I think we have it. Hi, Siri Hadrin, a reporter with S&P Global. If you're gonna address this later, then apologies, but I guess I need comments specifically on the progress on the hydrogen and carbon removal goals. Yeah, so the hydrogen goal, again, incredibly ambitious, our goal for the hydrogen earth shot is to get down to $1 per kilogram through electrolysis. So this is the cleanest of hydrogen using renewables. That is not where we're at right now. We've got a lot of work to do on that front. What I think is particularly exciting about hydrogen right now in our country is, again, thanks to Congress and this president, we've got a whole range of tools in our tool belt to get to that goal. So among other things, we at the Department of Energy have $7 billion right now going out to hydrogen hubs, seven hydrogen hubs across our country. That's a lot of money, and that's a great way to do hydrogen and bring the scale of economy that allows us to reduce costs at significant scale. Above and beyond that, we've got a billion additional dollar for a creative demand side stimulator so that we have demand created so that supply of that clean hydrogen can match up, supply and demand, working the economic side of things. Congress also gave us an additional $1.5 billion directly to work on electrolyzer costs. I was just out in California meeting with one of those electrolyzer companies right now, incredibly impressive what they're doing, and these are veterans, this particular company, veterans from solar industry for 15 years, folks who know the game, folks who know the industry, incredible technology and innovation going on in that space, but we've got that additional $1.5 billion. We also have for the first time ever a national hydrogen strategy in our country, not just a DOE strategy, a national strategy, and we have a national interagency task force. We're working with Department of Defense and Commerce and others who have important levers of their own, and we have an incredibly powerful tax incentive, the hydrogen production tax credit that's getting an awful lot of attention. We've got it out for notice. We want feedback to make sure that we get the most out of that tax incentive. That's up to $3 per kilogram of a tax incentive for the cleanest of hydrogen. So again, you put all that together, you're purposeful, you're intentional, you track, I think we have a very, very good chance of meeting that dollar per kilogram cost standard, cost and hydrogen can be, it's called the Swiss Army Knife of Energy. It can be applicable for industry, heavy duty, heavy long haul trucking and marine transport, other harder to decarbonize sectors. So this is where I get excited, our team gets excited by all of these tools really leaning in, and thank you again to Congress for giving us those tools. I'm Sierra Kato with Lewis Burke Associates. I guess my question is, is the affordable housing IRF shot the final IRF shot or does DOE have plans to launch any additional IRF shot? Yeah, so what we wanted to do, and it is the final IRF shot, at least for this time period, what we wanted to do is not just have 80 different IRF shots, right? Like we wanted to be very disciplined on those key areas where we really think we need to hone in and work. It doesn't mean that other technologies that I didn't mention that aren't part of the IRF shots aren't important, but we wanted to be quite disciplined so that we really could organize ourselves in DOE, work with folks in Congress to make sure we have the budgets that are able to really drive these key technology areas. So now that we've got the eight and we've got what we consider a good cross representation across the board, this is the eight IRF shots that we will be really engaging, working in and talking about. Thank you very much. I know you have to leave, so I hope everyone will treat you to one last round of applause. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Thanks to everyone on your team. It must be a faster way to put these up. All right, well, thank you for that, David, and thanks to everyone in our audience for staying with us now to hear the panel that David referred to. This is a tremendous, tremendous panel, and we are gonna get into some of the specifics for these IRF shots. And to kick us off is Carolyn Snyder. Oh, actually, before I introduce Carolyn, I forgot one thing. We will have more time for questions. So for folks in the room who are able to stick with us through the presentations, you'll be once again welcome to ask questions. We'll also be taking questions from our online audience. And so if you have questions for our panel and you're watching online, and I know there's a lot of you, you can send us an email. And the email address to use is ask, that's ASK, at EESI.org. And one last thing, sorry, to delay your introduction. All of the presentation materials, all of the information, all of it's on the front table, it's also online. And if you'd like to go back and revisit any of the presentations you're about to see, you can do that by going to our website, which is EESI.org. And now it is my pleasure to introduce Carolyn Snyder. Carolyn is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Buildings and Industry at the Department of Agriculture. In this role, she leads offices that advance energy efficiency and reduce emissions from our nation's buildings and industry while supporting U.S. energy security and manufacturing competitiveness. Previously, Carolyn served as the Director of the Environmental Protection Agency's Climate Protection Partnerships Division, where she led voluntary partnerships with thousands of industrial, commercial, utility, state, and local organizations. Carolyn, welcome to the briefing today. I'll turn it over to you. And if you'd like to bring your name card, I'll be happy to put mine down so everyone can see you. Thank you. Well, good afternoon, everyone. I just wanna echo the Deputy Secretaries, thanks, Dan, to you and your amazing team, Problem Solving in Real Time, for everything you do to help make sure we have data and scientific and informed decision-making conversations in our government, which is so essential for our functioning democracy. So thank you so much. And I also wanna echo thanks for all of you in the room joining us and joining us virtually, for making the time today to learn more about what we feel is a very exciting portfolio of R&D happening to our country that really has the potential to be transformative. I'm gonna talk today of the little bit more information about two of those earth shots and starting with our industrial heat shot. It was established to develop cost competitive industrial heat decarbonization technologies that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 85% from current technologies within 10 years. So why are we obsessed with industrial heat despite the fact that I think heat shot might be the most fun of the names? Well, first of all, in the US industrial sector is responsible for roughly a third of the nation's primary energy use and a little less than that of our energy related carbon dioxide emissions. And it's estimated that more than 60% of the technologies that we're gonna be needing to reduce those emissions are not currently market ready. The technology innovation challenge is massive. And industrial heat is the largest single source of those emissions in the manufacturing sector. So roughly 11% of all US energy related emissions come from industrial process heat. But addressing that challenge will be no easy feat. We have a diversity of processes and energy needs across US manufacturing. And industrial heat is a great example of that. Although pervasive and essential to so many manufacturing processes, for example, every major industrial subsector uses heat, but they use heat in different ways and at different temperatures, ranging here as you can see on our graphic from 300 degrees Celsius to over 800 degrees Celsius. One of my favorite conversations with industries when they tell me, but Carolyn, you have to understand I make volcanoes onsite in my plant. How are we going to address that? And decarbonizing industrial heat will, as we've said, will be essential to meeting our 2050 climate targets. We estimate that our heat shot can put US industrial sector on the path for potentially reducing 575 million metric tons of carbon equivalent emissions by 2050, which is equivalent to the current emissions from US passenger vehicles each year. DOA identified three technology pathways that we think are possible for achieving this goal. And we're going to need innovations in each of these three. One, generating heat from clean electricity. Two, integrating heat from low emission sources. And three, innovating to find new, low or new heat process technologies. I think of this pathway as entirely new ways of making things than how we make them today. Underpinning these three pathways are enabling technologies, materials and systems that are essential to the success of all of this work and in many ways, the work across all of our eight energy earth shots. Improving the efficiency of industrial processes will also allow for more specialized manufacturing on different scales, which in turn allows smaller factories to thrive, creating new job opportunities across our country, stimulating competition and helping revitalize local economies. And as the deputy secretary mentioned, by leveraging these three pathways together, the industrial heat shot can also help deliver environmental and energy justice benefits. Reducing the greenhouse gas emissions is one benefit of many of these technology innovations. They also reduce critical air pollution and thus they improve the health of communities across our country that are living in proximity to manufacturing facilities. So it's a massive challenge. What are we doing across the DOE and federal family? Well, it's an all hands on deck approach. As you can see, violating the font signed rules for my slide here, but we are really pulling the full strength of federal government mobilized by this target. In our science and innovation portfolio at DOE, we created a new office solely focused on industrial efficiency and decarbonization. The industrial efficiency and decarbonization office, or IEDO, can't help the acronyms for short, provides now at DOE an expanded set of leadership and staff expertise that are focused in each of the major energy and emission intensive industries and the cross cutting technology solutions like process heat requires. Across our R&D offices, and I already have this in my notes, a shout out to the 2020 Energy Act as well, we are leveraging the technologies for industrial emissions reduction development program that the agency was directed to create in the 2020 Energy Act to focus our close collaboration across DOE in this highly synchronized all hands on deck approach to industrial R&D. What does that mean? Well, within IEDO, we have consolidated science and innovation investments in energy efficiency and electrification. With IEDO and the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, we partner closely for carbon capture and utilization investments. For the supply and utilization of low carbon fuels, feedstocks and energy sources, we combine investments from bioenergy, hydrogen, solar and nuclear. And our Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations is funding large scale industrial demonstration projects as well. In addition, as I talked about that cross cutting role, our Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office and our Office of Science, we're closely together to make sure that we have those innovation in the materials and manufacturing processes that will be required for any of this to succeed. So what has DOE been up to? Well, DOE has already taken several key actions since the launch of this EarthShot to drive innovation against our goals. Last May, we launched EPICS, our Seventh Manufacturing USA Institute at DOE. It's led by Arizona State University and the goal is to develop electrified industrial heating processes that support as well as the related supporting technologies and the necessary skilled workforce. This institute aims to reduce manufacturing emissions by up to 60 million metric tons in 15 years. Last June, we announced over 10 projects related to decarbonizing thermal processes with over $37 million of federal funding. And last September, our Office of Science announced $264 million for 29 projects in support of the EarthShots, including Energy EarthShot Research Centers and Science Foundation projects. Last October, our Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations announced the $7 billion for seven regional clean hydrogen hubs that Deputy mentioned earlier. And just last month, AIDO announced over 15 projects related to decarbonizing thermal processes with over $50 million in federal funding. And we have two FOAs out on the street right now for over $120 million in R&D funding in industrial efficiency and decarbonization. Our solar team continues to lead with concentrated solar, thermal, R&D, and Dr. Green will be speaking about some of our Crosstio we work on chemical feedstocks where NREL has been a real leader as well. Our competitions across DOE continue to be oversubscribed, demonstrating the wealth of untapped American innovation and the continued hunger we're hearing from industry to partner with us on industrial R&D. So with that, I'm going to transition to a brief summary of our affordable home, Energy EarthShot. While jobs, economic, and energy justice are central to executing all of our energy EarthShots, this is a special one. It's the first shot where we're specifically targeting underserved communities from the very beginning, and it's launched as a partnership between our Building Technologies Office at DOE and our Office of Economic Impact and Diversity, which is the first time we have that type of co-leadership for one of our shots. We call this Energy EarthShot equity-centered in people first, and the reason I say that is that in our country, over one in five households are unable to pay their energy bill in full as of 2022. And black and indigenous and people of color households are more likely to face high-energy burdens, energy insecurity, and adverse pollution and health impacts. For example, recent studies have found that asthma rates among black children in America are twice the national average. These trends disproportionately impact lower-income residents who live more often in older homes that lack adequate insulation and energy-efficient equipment. The affordable home Energy EarthShot is a call to ensure that building decarbonization solutions can benefit all households, especially those struggling to meet basic energy needs. Why is the building sector important? Well, our nation's 130 million homes and buildings are responsible for consuming 40% of the nation's energy, nearly 75% of electricity. So when we talk about decarbonizing electricity sector, we are inherently talking about the end-use demand from buildings and an even greater share of peak electricity demand, and they count for roughly 30% of total greenhouse gas emissions. As outlined in our recently announced national blueprint for building decarbonization by 2050, to meet these goals, we require three core strategies. One, increase efficiency. Energy efficiency is more important than ever. Two, we need to accelerate the onsite emissions reductions that we have begun across our country. And three, we have to transform our investments in the grid edge so that we can reduce the electrical infrastructure costs being borne by rate pairs across our country. And we need to do all of that while increasing affordability, addressing resilience and health and safety challenges in our nation's homes and communities. On top of all of that, approximately 75% of today's homes will still be in operation in 2050. So this is not just a new construction conversation. This has to be a conversation of retrofitting millions of buildings a year. With that inspiration in mind, our affordable home energy urshot focuses specifically on solutions to address the challenges of decarbonizing our affordable housing stock at that remarkable of a rate. And when I say affordable housing stock, we're talking about the roughly 50 million single family, multifamily, and manufactured homes across our country, occupied by households that are earning less than 80% of meat income. Our investments are grounded in one simple truth. Every American deserves to live in a home with affordable, clean, and reliable power. Our goal is to make these cutting-edge technologies so cheap that we can cut the cost of energy-efficient retrofit packages by 50%, while also lowering energy bills for residents of affordable housing by 20%, all within the next decade. So how are we gonna do this? Similar to many of our urshots, there are multiple pathways of technology innovation to achieve this goal. Here you see a foundation of deep energy efficiency layered with efficient electrification and grid integration. What kind of technologies are we talking about here? Well, super-insulated panels that you can put on the outside of your home, keeping you comfortable without major renovations, compact heat pumps that are light and affordable, not requiring space adjustments or electrical infrastructure investments, and they are comfortable in any season. Smart controls that help residents save money without even noticing the changes to their consumption. And all together, these technologies delivering a whole-home package to achieve these remarkable goals. These technologies can also improve the health and safety of our homes, and DOE is leading several R&D portfolios across this framework, including efficient and low-cost HVAC with low and global warming potential refrigerants, geothermal heat pumps, our e-robot prize for reducing the cost of insulating ducts and walls, our easy prize for technology solutions to avoid electrical upgrades, including 120-volt heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, and smart breaker and smart panel technologies. And I just wanna do one last example, which is our building's upgrade prize, where we're fostering seeds of innovation in 45 communities across our country to develop innovation and building retrofits through more than $22 million in cash prizes and technical assistance. So lastly, I just wanna put an offer out to all of you. We want to engage with your organizations, with members in your districts, to have their challenges, their successes, be how we prioritize our investments in both of these portfolios. So please let us know if you're interested in being involved in our strategy and road-mapping discussions. I hope, as you can see from my remarks today, from large industrial facilities to manufactured housing and rural communities, we're leveraging these ur-shots to marshal the full power of American innovation from the private sector, from our brain trust in the national labs and universities to develop solutions that work for every American communities and companies. So thank you so much. And again, thanks for including me today. Such a great presentation. And I'm glad that you have the brain trust because when you said volcanoes, I was like, oh, vinegar and baking soda. I could figure that out. Yeah. Thank you very much. This is probably a good moment. We had David, we have Carolyn. There's actually a lot of DAE folks in the audience today. Maybe they could just raise their hands a little bit. If congressional staff want to take a moment maybe to chat with them a little bit after the briefing today, they are tremendous resources. And you mentioned building technologies office. We had Mandy Mahoney, one of our expo panels last year. I think we were her first speaking engagement after she took the job, which was always really, really fun. That brings us to our second panelist today. Nidhi Takkar is Vice President of Policy and Regulatory at Forum Energy. In this role, she leads forums at Global Policy and Regulatory Strategy to develop markets for multi-day energy storage. Before this, Nidhi was Senior Director of Resource and Regulatory Strategy and Engagement for Portland General Electric. She also served in the administration of California Governor Jerry Brown. And during the Obama-Bide administration, she was the Senior Advisor to the U.S. Department of Energy's Loan Program Office. Welcome to the briefing today. I will make way for your name tent and your slides are already teed up, so take it away. Thank you so much. Okay, good afternoon. And thanks for sticking with us here. This has been a fantastic discussion to date. I do want to start with my own thank you because I have to say, as a prior congressional staffer, who used to report into Cannon House Office Building almost 20 years ago, it's always fun to come back to the Hill. And I want to thank you for taking the time to be here with us today. I know you have extremely busy schedules. And so carving out that time for an educational deep dive is always challenging, but we really appreciate it. And I would like to just hope that by the end of my presentation today, you all have a good sense of what is long-duration energy storage? You see the value of multi-day storage or long-duration storage, as well as the opportunities that lie before us. And frankly, what it means to be a company looking to transform the electric grid using multi-day storage in the United States with an America-first approach. So an American company with an American manufactured product that is going to increase American grid reliability, resiliency, and energy security. So I'll start here with a little overview of who form energy is. So I mentioned that we are currently manufacturing a novel 100-hour iron-air battery used strictly for grid-scale storage. It's not for electrification of vehicles. The technology doesn't quite work in that context. I'll tell you a little bit more about that. We currently have four offices. We're about 700 employees now. We do most of our R&D work in Somerville, Massachusetts. In California and Berkeley, we do our battery engineering work. We're currently doing pilot manufacturing by hand in 84 Pennsylvania, which is right outside of Pittsburgh. That work is being scaled up in Weirton, West Virginia in our inaugural battery manufacturing plant that's currently under construction. And we'll be doing high volume manufacturing at that plant. Initially 50 megawatts and when that plant is built out to full capacity, 500 megawatts a year. We actually just broke ground at that manufacturing site last Memorial Day weekend. I'm really excited to say that the plant itself is almost fully constructed. The core and shell is done. We're starting to put the finishing touches on the building and we're gonna start landing equipment in that manufacturing plant, hopefully by next month. Secretary Granholm was at our groundbreaking ceremony. We were very delighted to have her along with representatives from the West Virginia delegation in the governor's office, Senator Manchin as well, and Senator Capito who was also a part of the success. Our investors, we've had 820 million to date invested in the company and that number is really up there, I think for a couple of reasons. The first is to let you know that this is an illustration of investor confidence in not just form energy, but the technology and the use case for multi-day storage and long duration storage in the United States and globally, frankly, because we really haven't charted that path even globally.  I think, building some of the largest infrastructure projects we've had in the United States for decarbonized energy, it's very cost intensive and then when you add another layer of manufacturing on top of that, very capital intensive from that standpoint. And then the last is just, we have a tremendous amount of experience at the company, not just at our executive level, but down to every level of the team and it's a really impressive bunch of minds that have come together to solve this really hard challenge we have. So what is the challenge? I think we all know that fundamentally the electric grid is in this very dynamic environment. It has to transform to meet tomorrow's challenges and frankly, even today's challenges and that's everything from concerns around a lack of electricity on the grid to a lack of transmission and dealing with aging infrastructure as well as trying to think about what this energy transition looks like and how do you do that in a way that's gonna be affordable, cost effective and share reliability on the grid. We talked a little bit about weather today, weather modeling came up I think a couple times and as we all have all experienced in this room we're seeing changing weather patterns and these weather patterns have become very disruptive to our grid. We also are seeing power supply becoming much tighter. I think if you've seen any of the power markets in Texas and the Pacific Northwest and in the West in particular, you've seen exacerbated prices, thousand dollars per megawatt hour for electricity. Ultimately the customer pays for that, right? Like a rate payer pays for that and so we're seeing that we're having just reduced and we're having an increase for electricity and the need for frankly more electrons as we look to electrify our grid and we're having a reduced power supply for a number of reasons. Also we're seeing more of an influx of wind and solar in particular on the grid and with that comes the need to firm up those resources so you have more consistent supplies of generation. And then finally I mentioned transmission. We have an aging transmission grid in the United States. We have concerns around just a lack of transmission as well as the fact that some of that transmission is pretty old and needs a refresh. So taking this back to why we're here today from the long duration storage shot angle. So the long duration storage shot has the target of reducing the cost of grid scale storage by 90% per system that deliver 10 plus hours of duration within the decade and why is this important? Why does energy storage matter? Why does long duration storage matter? The reality is energy storage is critical to decarbonized reliability. Without storage we can't firm up those clean energy resources I mentioned such as wind and solar when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining the question becomes what do you do in those situations? And then the flip side of that is when the wind is blowing a lot and the sun is shining a lot what do you do when you have excess energy? Right now there's really no place to put that excess energy other than short duration storage like lithium ion batteries that are on the grid and they can help with sort of those two to six hour peaks and valleys that we see in our electric grid but we don't really have another option as you get further along that trajectory and are looking to address wind lulls or solar lulls of 24 plus hours or having again excess electricity. So I think what's interesting about this long duration storage shot too is there's an opportunity to really commercialize an innovative technology through this process but I think it's not just about commercializing a technology and American innovation it's about what it means more holistically for the United States and I mentioned American energy independence which I think the war in Ukraine has highlighted for us a real critical need to address those vulnerabilities. I think through COVID we saw concerns around supply chain and I think the more we're able to onshore American manufacturing that helps reduce the vulnerabilities around some of the supply chain risk we see that can feed into our energy security and so I think while it's important to think about decarbonized reliability we also really need to be thinking about these issues from the angle of American energy independence and security. So this next slide just really gives you I think the value case for long duration storage or multi-day storage. I mentioned that we already have a well-established class of short duration storage that's batteries, that's pumped hydro, flywheel technologies. Those technologies have existed for a long time we have proof of concept deployed nationally in many, many places and we're now seeing a push and interest towards this period of I would say 10 to 160 hours is noted in this chart with a predominant focus on like the 36 hours to 160 hour portion of that light green band you see there. We have some companies on the market right now with commercialized technologies of 10 to 12 hours I would say roughly and I would probably put them within sort of the mid-day storage camp or inter-day storage camp but again thinking about multi-day storage, long duration storage that's an entirely new technology class an entirely new energy sector and the form 100 hour iron-air battery is just one example of a technology that could fall within that class. We talked a little bit about hydrogen, hydrogen storage could be one of those other technologies. I would say that we are probably one of the farthest companies along in commercializing a technology in the multi-day storage sector. Okay so this is a little bit about the iron-air battery that we're commercializing so effectively what we are doing is rusting and unrusting a battery and the interesting thing about iron-air batteries is this is not a new battery chemistry. Back in the 70s, Westinghouse received a grant through the Department of Energy to study iron-air batteries and the use case was electric vehicles. Folks found that naturally an iron-air battery is too heavy for transportation hence why we are now thinking about it in the context of grid-scale storage. So the five co-founders of form energy, many of them had worked in the sector before, actually all of them, excuse me, had worked in the sector before and their focus had been on short duration technologies and they were left with the question of what do we do in these situations where we don't have the wind blowing and the sun shining for extended periods and how do we think about long duration technologies that was the challenge that they went out to solve and they tried a number of battery chemistries and ended up landing on iron-air because it is highly cost effective, very scalable, iron is the second most mind commodity globally and unlike lithium ion you don't have a concern with thermal runaway or dendrites that form and flammability so again that goes to the safety of it. This is a little bit of a picture just to give you a visualization of what the form battery will look like when it's deployed in the field. We have a cell, the smallest functional unit of the battery on the left and if you look all the way to the right you have what a system looks like. That's essentially multiple 40 foot shipping containers that contain batteries within the enclosures. I'm gonna just fast forward here a little bit more. I'm gonna jump over to our commercial scale manufacturing that we have going on in Wharton, West Virginia. This is a really impressive story. I spoke about our manufacturing that we're standing up there. It's high volume manufacturing. 750 jobs are going to come out of building our first phase of this factory so I think that gives you a sense of what it means to be able to onshore American manufacturing in the United States. I sort of really think we're at this inflection point where we're seeing a reindustrialization in the United States and this picture signifies bringing energy security, decarbonized reliability in American manufacturing and innovation altogether. And lastly, this is just a slide with some of our commercial partners and I think this slide in particular is important because it highlights the confidence that utilities have in our technology and their desire and willingness to deploy a 100-hour battery in their energy systems. We discussed the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act today and I would just say that I think those tools noted by the deputy secretary are very critical to stay in place. They are going to be and already are accelerating commercialization of critical innovative technologies and also increasing affordability and we've talked about affordability a couple times today and I do think ultimately that's where the rubber meets the road here and our customers are going to be deploying a 100-hour iron-air battery. Their regulators have to agree that that battery makes sense for the customers to pay for at the end of the day and that there's benefit to the electric grid for deploying a first-of-a-kind innovative technology and so that sort of brings the idea of getting from R&D to commercialization and then deployment vis-a-vis investor-owned utilities, publicly-owned utilities and being a consumer of what that looks like at the end of the day. Look forward to your questions later, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Is it all right if I, I would kind of like to back up. On your slide here, you have the new construction happening but then there's that older building and I'm pretty sure I've seen a version of this photo that kind of superimposes what was there before and what's there now. Could you just maybe comment just for a moment about this site and what the site means? Sure, I'd be happy to. This site is extremely rich in cultural heritage. It is the old Weirton steel mill site. The steel mill at one point employed about 13,000 people. Now the city of Weirton is about 12,000. That gives you a sense of the scale of employment. That employment was lost about 50 years ago when they tore down the steel mill site and this is one of the shuttered areas in the United States that I think many of you are familiar with where we had the heyday of industrialization in the United States and then we've seen that dwindle and it's exciting to be able to bring back that hope and that prosperity to a community. The folks in Weirton have been incredible. Frankly, in the entire Northern Panhandle of West Virginia have just been very welcoming. That building in particular is the Open Hearth Building that you see over here on the, I guess for you, the right side. That's the last standing building on the Weirton steel mill site. We've decided to keep it and we're hoping to repurpose it as part of the larger plant. I don't, it won't be used in manufacturing operations. It'll probably just be like a, you know, an open-air pavilion but we felt like it was important to try to keep a piece of it. Could be a really long, like, curling place, right? Yes, that's right. Wherever that's called the ring. Very long bowling alley. Thank you very much for that. And it's always nice to be able to go back and look at people's slides. And if you'd like to, you can do that by visiting us online at www.esa.org. And if you wanna go back and watch any of our presentations. And as a reminder, we will have some questions at the end. So if you're in the room, start getting them ready. We'll do our best to get to as many as possible. And if you're online, you can send us an email to ask. That's ask.esa.org. Our third panelist today is Peter Green. Peter is the Deputy Laboratory Director for Science and Technology and the Chief Research Officer for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Peter began his career at Sandia National Laboratories where he spent a decade and subsequently two decades on the faculties of the University of Texas Austin and the University of Michigan. Peter is a former president of the Materials Research Society and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Peter, welcome to the briefing today. I'll turn it over to you. Thank you, Dan, and thank you for the invitation. I'm delighted to be here and I'd also like to thank you for attending. So you heard three presentations and they provide a really fantastic basis for what I'm about to share with you. I'm also going to re-emphasize a few things and perhaps a big message. The way to think about earth shots, right? The earth shots represent grand challenges that need to be addressed if we're to achieve net zero emissions. They were formed and managed by DOE working with other agencies, working with 17 national labs, and indeed academics and industry. The success is gonna rely greatly on collaboration between the above. They were defined based on very deep analysis, techno-economic analysis, financial analysis, also looking at scenarios or systems. So it was not a trivial undertaking. It is major and evolving. So maybe that's one of the most important messages I'd like you to leave with. I'm from NREL, the Blue Dot, so we're in Colorado, in Golden. And the lab was actually formed in 1977. That was just after the energy crisis of the 70s. And we worked on solar energy. It's the first solar lab. And the lab did not only very basic research, but it also connected with industry to show it's worth. It ran at risk of being shut down if we couldn't do that. So that's really set the DNA of the lab. If you look at solar, silicon being a dominant technology, the most efficient solar cells in the world right now, the multi-adjunction solar cells, that came from NREL. The largest thin film, thin film solar manufacturer in the U.S. is for solar. Can you tell me right, that essentially is work that was that organization was really founded based on collaborations with NREL. And still today, we do a lot of very basic research for them as long as foundational research to enable the work that they do. Just a few brief words about NREL. We're about 3,700 employees approximately. And we published around 1,200 papers. A lot of these are technical reports. Some of these are scientific papers collaborating with university and industry, virtually everywhere. In addition to solar, we're actually researching wind. And the first modern day design of wind blades that came from NREL working with industry, as an example. The next generation of wind blades is gonna be thermal plastics. That again, something led by NREL working with industry and academia for the most part. We have over 1,000 active partnerships. Working with a remote village in extreme weather environments and limited resources like in Alaska. To the city of LA, working in communities to help LA understand how can they achieve 100% renewable power. On the other end, we're working with companies like IBM and Microsoft and Google to excellent shell. This transition involves work and contributions from everybody in that sense. I want to share this with you, right? If you look at, for example, 1980 until today, there've been a large number of billion dollar extreme weather events. Droughts, floods, things like that. And the damage has been estimated to be over $2 trillion. One here is that we're seeing more extreme weather events than they were frequent. Today, scientists can tell as an article in physics today, you can tell basically which extreme weather events are associated with the work of humans. So we're having a lot more insight in what's going on. What is this telling us? If power bridge gotta improve, we need something that's more resilient, for sure. We'll look at how we produce things like fertilizer from ammonia, which basically in our fields have the global population. That's heavily intensive in terms of energy and GHG emissions, concrete asphalt. My point here is that we need to find ways that are less energy-intensive and in such a way that we're not gonna be emitting a launch. So new processes, new chemical processes, the biological processes that are being discussed right now, thinking of. I've begun plastics, right? We've begun making plastics in the 50s. And the weight of plastics that were literally produced is more than the weight of all humans on the planet. This is an example. So we need to find ways of making plastics rather than a petroleum road. We need to think of ways to upgrade and upcycle plastics and making new things. A lot of ideas out there, all right? We're gonna take advantage of a lot of the advances we've made over the last century as we've begun to build a wonderful economy globally based on fossil fuels. So we need to think outside the box going forward. So really then, we need to be thinking about a new energy system. And just by way of context, the current system, right? We generate power centrally and we simply distribute. Now we're looking at the way we're using energy to meet the needs of customers and it's more distributed. You know, we've got rooftop solar, we've got wind, things like that. We're collecting a lot more data about how we're using energy providing better support for customers. Eventually we're gonna make a grid that's going to be autonomous. And I wanna highlight the grid, the grid modernization initiative which began even prior to the current and even before the Trump administration where GOE was actually funding this. What is this new grid gonna look like? How is it gonna optimize? How does it provide needs for customers? How is it gonna be cost effective to ensure that it remains economical? So that works going on. And it's a collaboration between many of the national labs, industry and academics. So that's been happening for some time. Here's a nice graphic. So the idea is we think about decarbonizing to something like transportation. You start off, you get electrons from a renewable source, wind or solar, what have you. That can provide power for an electrolyzer to make hydrogen. Hydrogen you produce, you can actually capture CO2, which we're doing right now. And you can actually make new chemicals. You can make chemicals just like you can in petroleum road. You can make materials, yes. And you can make fuels, synthetic fuels for rail or for airplanes or what have you. So the blueprints there, what we have to be done at scale and cost. That's where the big challenges lie. And there's a lot of research to be done. And hence the earth shot provides, articulates what these challenges looks like and where we're going. Now, getting back to the, where the earth shots are going, I'm gonna give you a sense of how you might think about them, right? So you have a power generation, you wanna decarbonize the power generation, right? So we're gonna go primarily renewables. What it means then, for example, geothermal, we heard about geothermal earlier. So you wanna, if you wanna get to geothermal providing something in order of eight and a half percent of primary port of the U.S., you have to be the earth shot, okay? Offshore wind is the other one. You're gonna have to produce about a little over a terawatt of wind in a few years. It cannot be done without offshore wind. And that's where you're gonna have to think about basically designing systems that gonna work offshore in deep waters. Big, big challenge requiring lots of things. We've just heard about long duration storage for the grid. That becomes important. And we also heard from Assistant Secretary, Caroline, about affordable home energy and industrial heat. So that also follows as you're trying to decarbonize the production of things like steel as an example come through. And then the last part, we're thinking about clean fuels as you basically wanna get away from fossil-based fuels to making fuels synthetically or other ways that are from biomass. So you reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. So the point then is that these earth shots really reflect things that we have some insight into how to do. But getting there is gonna be a highly collaborative process. This is gonna be expensive. And yes, we're doing it. So we can actually survive, as I showed you, the extreme weather events are just getting more and more severe. We don't know where it's gonna stop if we don't do something, right? So the offshore wind I mentioned, I wanna share that with you. So just this image of things. You'd like to be able to simulate very carefully before you build things to understand what the challenges look like. As of a few weeks ago, we've developed an exascale computing system. It's at Oak Ridge National Labs. This is the era has arrived. And right now we can do much more realistic simulations of looking at the performance of wind machines. Are the interactions within the atmosphere? We don't know much about that, by the way. Or the interactions are sitting on a series of all these buoyancy forces playing out. We don't know quite frankly how to deal with this. The simulations give us a lot of insight into how that happens. And it's highly collaborative between the labs, a lot of universities and industry, by the way. I wanna say something about hydrogen. Most of the hydrogen used today has actually come from fossil fuels, right? Steam methane reforming. Pretty bad stuff with a lot of emissions. And hydrogen is already very important, right? We use it a lot. We use it, for example, to make ammonia. Then ammonia of the fertilizer or methanol. Or we use it for refining petroleum. All kinds of things that are metals. And in the future, we heard this is gonna be really important for trying to re-grit stability. It's gonna be a key part of how we do things as we look at conversion from chemical to electrical energy, as well as providing feedstocks. So we can't rely on this fossil-based generation alone. Maybe a carbon capture can help. But electrolysis is gonna be a key part of it. This is how you get clean hydrogen, essentially. But the issue getting about there is cost. But if you look at all the examples over there in terms of applications, we begin to get some insight from production of fuels and chemicals all the way to transportation. Trains, that's another example in Europe. Forklifts in warehouses. These are huge applications to think about. I show you a picture of a wind machine outside a wind turbine and a wind machine, same thing. I never see wind mill, all right? Or, how to see the resources of Deputy Turk mentioned is huge and his constant is much better than land. And that's the one reason why I do that. And so you can actually produce hydrogen and provide you once you get power from the wind to do that. Lots of people are thinking about this. The challenge now is a cost. And just look at the green region is basically the cost of electricity. It's high.  Even though electricity from wind and solar is comparable to fossil, it's gonna get cheaper. The other aspect of it is the capital costs. There's a lot of research on electrolyzers to do this. Electrolyzers aren't all over a century old, but there wasn't much research done on them. No, we're doing it. So there's a lot of progress to be made. And I really wanna emphasize that. People are pretty enthusiastic. The bipartisan infrastructure law has a billion dollars invested in working on electrolyzers. And indeed, the inflation reduction that provides tax incentives to people writing. All right, I'm giving the hook. This is just a picture of all interaction between all the labs and things going on. This last thing I wanna mention, clean fuels. You can take biomass and you can convert this to molecules and chemicals and fuels. We know to do that. And you can also, you can capture CO2, direct your capture, or from industrial processes and convert that with hydrogen to chemicals and materials. This is just a graphic of that. And my final remark I wanna make to you is that this challenge is not just a scientific and technological advance, it's not just that. It relies on the government investments. It relies on really smart policies. So even these policies from the IRA were actually developed based on very, very deep analysis to guide that if you make an investment, what's gonna potentially happen? We know it's working, or they know it's working. That's the key thing. And then finally, implementation. You wanna make sure you work in communities and you're doing something that makes sense to them. You can't just take a wind turbine and put it in a community and say it's gonna work. You gotta spend time. We actually do the live with the community to understand what it is that they need. Develop an analysis with them collectively, collaboratively, and then go back and implement. We even go so far as making digital twins of a system and we're sitting down with people to understand how it's gonna work. And so unless everybody's involved in this transition, it's not gonna work. Unless everybody benefits from it, it's not gonna work. So with this, let me thank you. All right, we are gonna transition to questions and we'll go a little bit past because we started a couple minutes late, but I'm gonna look out in the audience and if I see you, my colleague Nicole will bring over the microphone looking. I'm gonna get us started. And I think I'd like to ask a question. Maybe Carolyn, we can start with you and then go down through the panel. You know, eight earth shots, that seems to be the right number for now, right? David was talking about really focusing and being disciplined. Do you have any thoughts about what might, some benefits of DOE working on eight simultaneously? Are there things that maybe are happening in one earth shot that might be informing the work in the other earth shots? And I'd love to hear a little bit sort of about what the advantage of maybe trying to make progress on eight at the same time might be. Yeah, thank you for that. I think Peter did a great job mapping out how many of these earth shots relate with each other and the deputy secretary referenced how there was robust analytical investment in deciding on what those earth shots are. And it's a challenge, right? It's really demotivating to say you have to do everything at once, but it is a complicated set of challenges we face and so one earth shot wasn't the right amount, but finding ones that really could help mobilize us to big, bold targets where we're lagging in a way that are coordinated with each other. And I think you've seen that both in our private sector work and in our work with national labs and universities that we are connecting those dots. We're appropriate. I come to things from an end use sector perspective. So you heard me talk about the industrial earth shot, the homes are shot. We come from that perspective, United States industry is not saying like I want just this earth shot. We need to solve the problems they're facing in their manufacturing facility and that's gonna require a set of solutions and we think this is the right portfolio to make sure that we're working on those innovations that are required. Thanks. Maybe please go ahead. Sure. What Carolyn said and I would also just add to that. I think thinking about these eight earth shots together helps you better understand the kind of market you're trying to move overall and the goals you're trying to implement when you're looking to have decarbonized reliability, how you think about what that trajectory to commercialization looks like. Peter's last slide was really I think a great depiction on all the tools in the toolbox needed to get past from R&D to commercialization and for those technologies to have to navigate that valley of death through that process. And so I think overall having that intersectionality of resources really gives you the benefit of a holistic planning tool. That's right and just to compliment what everybody said. There's research happening in a lot of areas and a lot of places at some time. What the earth shots have done is really help us to understand what a real challenge looks like so we can actually bring a lot of diverse ideas together to address them. So in that sense I thought it was a sort of a brilliant move on the part of DOE to help people understand where the work that we're doing can fit into things. Oftentimes the people who didn't know as an example and then providing some investments and incentives to address them. Without that, we were sort of rudderless trying to get to 2050. I'm looking for our questions. I have another one, I have lots of them. I have a whole page of them. Maybe we could start with you for this one since you're kind of the private sector representative today. I think it's really cool the way the panel came together. We have lots of voices and featuring obviously lots of work at DOE in the labs but we wouldn't be able to... DOE sort of starts this stuff but really it's the private sector that will ultimately commercialize it. What are some additional partners that you're looking around the long duration energy storage space and eager to work with and what can some of those partners bring to bear to help the LDS earth shot become a reality and maybe even a reality at the sort of accelerated time frame that David was referencing. Yeah, well I definitely think engagement from the federal agencies is absolutely critical. I think we're asking the private sector to be really bold at this point in time with the unprecedented level of incentives that are available from Bill and IRA and we have partners with the federal agencies and helping us be bold but also need them to continue to be bold on modeling and metrics and how you think about how all these technologies fit into the grid and then I'd also say the state regulators and sort of state legislators and state agencies, state energy offices are absolutely critical in that deployment curve and the adoption of first of a kind technologies. Even when you go to commercialize a technology and I sort of wear my loan programs hat when I say this, you know the reality is is you have to have offtake. You have to have someone who wants to purchase whatever you're producing whether it's on the manufacturing side or on the clean energy side from like a solar project or a wind project and that doesn't happen without the support of regulators who ultimately approve or disapprove whether a utility is going to be able to purchase that type of electricity or whatever kind of resource is being procured and I'll say this one more time. All of this goes hand in hand with affordability for a customer at the end of the day. So it's all part of this larger kind of, I would say, I don't want to say it's almost like a wheel here of innovation that we have. Peter, from where you're sitting at Enra, what are some additional stakeholders that you're eager to bring into the fold? Yeah, that's an excellent question. So remember, long duration storage, the current storage for grid is lithium ion batteries and we're trying to get to a fraction of the cost of lithium ion batteries. So it's gonna be looking at all this way beyond batteries. Thermal storage, I think on the Karelin's portfolio, for example, there's a lot of work going on in there. And indeed it's bringing work collaborators and people from all different directions to address there, literally. Yeah, great. Caroline, if you have anything you'd like to comment on, that'd be great. Yeah, two quick additions. I would say making sure that our research priorities are informed by the challenges being faced on the ground in the communities we're trying to serve. And I think the affordable home energy shot is a bold statement for us of really flipping the prioritization of how we approach technology investment in buildings. We are starting with multifamily manufactured housing, old and more challenging footprints, not higher and more expensive new construction buildings is one. And then I'd also just do a plus one on these points about state regulatory environments. As you saw with Peter's graphics, the electricity, the flow of electrons is how a lot of these technologies are gonna be interacting. And a lot of that's happening in a distribution system whose planning is fragmented across our country. And as someone who started in public service for the state of Delaware in a small state, the challenge is to bring the kind of analytics and science-informed decision-making for the massive interactions and transformations we're seeing in our grid is, those are hard challenges and one where we've been working with the national lab colleagues around how do we give better decision support resources? Every state has different priorities, but how can we be more helpful that they're achieving their goals? Because it's remarkable the amount of transformations happening in our power sector at the same time. And analysis from our national labs show, if you get that on the more right end, more societally efficient way, you can save on the order of hundreds of millions a year in electrical infrastructure costs, which is real money that could be going into other public priorities. Great, thanks. Maybe I'd like to end with just a quick, maybe we'll treat this one as a lightning round because I think Peter, perhaps we could start with you and then we could hear from Carolyn and so we're not always ending and starting with the same person. Peter, let's pretend we're back here February 1st, 2025. What would you like to say about the progress that earth shots have made over the course of the next 12 months or so? Oh, Peter, could you turn your mic on? Sorry. Yeah, there's a roadmap that's been implemented for each of the earth shots and I would be comfortable if we're on track. That would be my biggest wish right now. That's at least in the early stage. Great, thanks. Carolyn? I would say a shared sense of urgency as you heard from the deputy secretary, every year that goes by that's the cost of inaction that makes it that much harder to achieve our shared goals. So I want private capital, public capital and the best minds across our country mobilized to work on these challenges. Nity, I think this means you have the last word today. Okay, and I'll take that one step further and say one year out and five years out that earth shots are working. The cost curve is coming down. We are seeing more steel in the ground. Technologies are being deployed that are forcing that cost curve to come down and through that you have public sector support whether it's through debt or capital that's helping bring that cost curve down in conjunction with private capital. And better modeling and metrics. I'm gonna put a plug in for this again because all of these technologies require a good way to measure them to ensure they're working in the right way and we're valuing them in the correct way for ultimately energy markets and utilities and other entities who will be embracing these technologies. Great, well thank you very much. We're gonna have to wrap it there because they're starting to get ready for the next event. I saw a garbage can appear in the back of the room but before we close things out I think our panel deserves one last round of applause. So thank you so much for joining us today. Really amazing presentations and really very, very cool work. I mean I don't think there's really any other way to say it. I'd also like to say thanks once again to Representative Tonko and his great staff at Seek for helping us with the room today and our congressional friends, Chairman Lucas and Representative Ross for joining us with their prerecorded remarks. I was gonna thank all of our friends at EERE but then I would just be reading the staff list. It's like reading the phone book but thanks to everyone at EERE and across the Department of Energy for helping us with our event today and that obviously extends to Maya and everyone at the labs as well. So thank you very, very much for all of that. I'd like to thank my colleagues, Dan O'Brien, Omri, Allison, Erin, Anna, Molly who's celebrating a birthday today, Molly and Nicole for all of the work that they put into our briefing today and this is our first briefing, second briefing of 2024 but the first with our interns, Emily and Megan are in the back of the room so they obviously made important contributions as well and Scott, thank you, couldn't do it without you as well. We will be back on February 15th for our next briefing about innovations and weather forecasting for a changing climate and then on leap day, the 29th, we managed to fit three briefings into February thanks to the leap year. Understanding the budget and appropriations process, you won't wanna miss that. This is a survey, if you have a moment in the room or online to take the survey, tell us what you thought of our event today. We'd really appreciate it, we read every response and if you have any suggestions for improvements or topics or things like that. Thank you again panelists for an amazing session and we will be back in a couple weeks and until then I hope everyone has a great rest of your Thursday and a nice weekend. Thank you so much.


Russia seeks to procure electronics for drones through Uzbekistan. Russia intends to create and finance shell enterprises in Uzbekistan for the assembly of drones using foreign electronic components. This move is seen as an attempt by Moscow to use Tashkent to circumvent international sanctions imposed due to its large-scale war against Ukraine reports the Ukrainian National Resistance Centre. In particular, this was discussed during a meeting between the leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States on December 26, 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Uzbekistan's President Shavkat Mirzyyoyev. Preliminary agreements have been reached regarding the creation of a number of shell companies on the territory of Uzbekistan, which will be financed by the Russian government, the article states. However, according to the National Resistance Centre, this involves the creation of fictitious companies to circumvent sanctions and enterprises that will be involved in the assembly of drones using foreign electronic components. The products and components are planned to be exported to several Russian defence enterprises, including Kazan, Instrument Plant, Elecon Plant and Stella K. The National Resistance Centre also reported the Kremlin's plans to purchase stocks of Soviet-era ammunition from Uzbekistan. Therefore, Russians plan to continue deploying fictitious enterprises in the countries of Central Asia to bypass international sanctions, the statement said. Besides Uzbekistan, Armenia is one of the country's helping Russia bypass international sanctions.


DAV encourages you to vote and actively support candidates of your choice, but as a DAV member, you have the responsibility to ensure your activities as a private citizen. Do not give the appearance that the organization supports or opposes any political candidate. Doing so would violate our congressional charter, national constitution bylaws, and the law and regulations governing DAV's tax exempt status. It's important to know the do's and don'ts during the election season, so let's take a quick look. First, do get involved. Whether it's political campaigns, rallies, forums, or town hall meetings, it's your right as an American citizen to support the candidate of your choice. But do not support a candidate or attend political events in support of a candidate in the name of DAV. Keep in mind that wearing DAV's caps and shirts at a political event can give the impression that DAV supports a particular candidate, which is a no-no. Second, do hold forums and town hall meetings so candidates can discuss their positions on issues affecting disabled veterans, their families, and survivors. But do not forget to invite all candidates to these events and make reasonable attempts to accommodate their schedules. Candidates do not have to accept the invitation or attend for you to hold the event, nor do they have to appear on the same day or at the same time. They do, however, have to be invited. And last, do make candidates aware of the issues facing wounded, injured, and ill veterans, their families, and survivors. Review DAV's national resolutions to ensure your position is in line with DAV when speaking on behalf of the organization. Do not forget that while DAV provides services to all veterans, our legislative goals focus on the betterment of wartime disabled veterans, their families, and survivors. And now you know.


Naomi Osaka has found her fans for their support after the four-time Grand Slam champion earlier this week was drew from the French Open site in mental health issues. The Japanese player initially said she would not attend the tournament's mandatory post-match press conference which she said put on new pressure on players. The 23-year-old world number two later announced she would not compete at all and revealed she had been suffering from a bout of depression for several years, leading to an outpouring of support. The International Tennis Federation has promised a comprehensive review on how players and media would interact during the tournament, saying it takes mental health issues extremely seriously.


I think it's maybe even better to take a step back and say, you know, how do you even look at that? You know, how should you look at the talent that you bring on to your startup? And, you know, is that a founder? Is that, you know, partial equity for salary? Is that full salary? Maybe to help them understand that maybe a little bit more. And then also the, you know, when should you establish a physical presence? One of our viewers out there, you know, are working specifically with remote teams. And so when do you need to have a physical presence, if ever? Yep. To me, with the employee thing, you should always pay your employees enough to live, right? And this is something I see startups not do and it really makes me upset. I see this happen in the U.S. as well where we have unpaid internships. Your employees cannot work well for your company if they cannot feed themselves, right, or house themselves and they have to worry about paycheck to paycheck. So make sure you understand that. I see a lot of companies to try to pay people just in equity when they're very small. I've gotten this too as a consultant.  And a lot of people who are not well familiar with startups would say, oh, great, because this could be the next Facebook. Something you really know, equity rarely ever turns into cash. Even if you get acquired, you have to pay back all the investors, all the founders, all the outside money that came in first. And there's usually very little left over in 99.9% of the cases for the employees.  And then you might not even get a lot. So really understand that. You trading equity for somebody's time is not the best deal for that. So I always try to make sure that it's very ethical and fair when we hire employees on. You wanna make sure that you're giving them a salary that might be slightly below what the standard is out there. If you're gonna do that and you're still strapped for cash, that's okay. But maybe make a deal with them. Maybe you don't need those employees to be full-time. Maybe you can make them four days a week if you only have a certain amount of cash and they can freelance on Fridays. Like try to figure out how to work it out that way. So it's really interesting to really figure this out. For equity-wise, it's always good to give somebody who's spending a lot of time who's dedicating some share in the company. That's great. Equity should be a bonus. It should not be looked at as a sole way you're gonna pay people, right? So when you are looking at equity and how much to give, I'm not an expert on this. There's a lot of legislature, not legislature, but a lot of documents out there that will tell you how to do it from investors. The thing to remember is you want to make sure that they're spending enough time in your company for that to actually vest. So that was the biggest advice I got in Italy. It was like, make sure these things don't invest immediately, which means that you just hand them shares. Make sure they vest over two years so people don't just work for a week. Take the shares and leave because if they leave, they will then have those shares forever. So you want to give them options and you want to make sure they vest over time. The right amount, I'm not exactly sure. Something that you can probably find on the web, but it's really important to have that cliff, to have that two year cliff, one year cliff, whatever you're gonna look at for that. But knowing that to make sure that you have a salary that actually matters and will attract the right talent. For me, when I was starting these companies, it's the biggest, I had, I started them very frugally, right? Like I put a little bit of money into it, not much, but I tried to just focus on monetizing, getting as much profit in. And it got to a certain point where I couldn't do everything myself. So that's when I started hiring people onto my business and working with them. And it was scary for me to actually trust somebody with that amount of work, right? That was my biggest fear. It was like, oh no, are they gonna be as good as me? Are they gonna be dedicated? And when you pay people a decent salary, right? That they're happy with and they don't feel like they're struggling.  So you want to pay them what they're worth. Then you will get people who are dedicated to you. Then you also have to trust them, right? You have to let go. That was my biggest thing. I had to just say, okay, this is where we're going, like how do we get there? And I asked for their opinions and I let them participate. And then they feel like they have a share in building something. So that was one of the hardest things for me to actually learn was hiring those employees for the first time. But it's amazing when you get good people, right? Like hire slow, fire fast is a big thing, but make sure you have the right people working with you.