As you probably know, the People's Republic of China is an enormous country with 1.4 billion people, and just like its population, the government is also massive. Controlled by the Communist Party of China, there are several different components that make up the government by law, but these branches essentially have no checks and balances. The most major, or populist, branch is the National People's Congress. Consisting of 2,980 members, it is the largest parliamentary body in the world, making the nation's legislative branch unicameral. The entirety of the NPC does not meet in full session except for two weeks every year, where the most important legislative matters are settled. For most of the year, the standing committee of the National People's Congress, forming just 170 members, stays in session, and these members are the most important out of all of the NPC. These 170 members do not have the opportunity to hold other government positions, as they are full-time legislators, unlike most of the NPC. As I said earlier, China's government does not have the concept of checks and balances, and the NPC gives a perfect example of this. By many accounts, it acts as a rubber stamping body for the State Council, the main executive branch, and the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party, which contains the highest officials of China. I'll get to both soon. Anyways, how are people exactly involved in the People's Republic? Well, not very involved. Citizens do vote for a local People's Congress, who in turn vote a member to the NPC. Also, these candidates must be part of the Communist Party, or be associated perhaps with an Allied Party. Moving to the executive branch now, the State Council consists of 35 members, with a Premier, an Executive Vice Premier, and at this current date three other Vice Premieres, five State Councilors, and 25 other Executive Officials who are each in charge of different bureaucracies. The Premier, who was chosen by the President, is the main Executive Leader, and serves as the head of the government. Still, the Premier is not the highest ranking official in the country. Instead, that position is given to the President. However, the President, by the law of China, is a ceremonial position. Then why does the President of China, Xi Jinping, have most the power in the country? This is due to him simultaneously holding the Office of General Secretary of the Communist Party. The General Secretary is by Chinese law the paramount leader of China, being the head of the Communist Party, and therefore having supreme political authority. In recent transfers of power, the First Secretary of the Secretariat, another high-ranking official in the Communist Party, succeeds the General Secretary after his resignation. This transfer of power is informal but has become the norm in recent years. Additionally, Xi Jinping holds the Office of Military Chairman, putting him in charge of all military sectors of the government. Now, hold on. Did you just say that the military forms a branch of the government? I sure did, and this branch is called the Central Military Commission. By law, they hold command over the People's Liberation Army, the main military forces for China, the People's Armed Police, a special paramilitary force involved in homeland defense and riot control, and the militia. In practice, however, the armed forces of China increasingly answer mainly to the Communist Party, rather than the Central Military Commission. I should note that the People's Armed Police are separate from the People's Police, the main police force commanded by the Ministry of Public Security, a bureaucracy managed by an officer in the State Council. The final pieces of the government I'll discuss have to do with the judicial system. There is the Supreme People's Court headed by the Chief Justice, which manages most judicial manners in the country, and serves as a last resort court. Additionally, a prosecuting branch of the judicial system exists, the Supreme People's Procuratorate. However, the laws upheld by the judiciary is not enforced in full in the special territories of Hong Kong and Macau, at least for now, as they have their own courts. But no discussion on the Chinese government is complete without an explanation on these special administrative regions, special economic zones, and the autonomous regions of China. I'll go into depth on all three of these in future videos, but the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau have the greatest autonomy from the central government of China. They can, by law, manage their own economics, courts, legislators, and languages, among other things. Despite this, the National People's Congress can still unilaterally write laws into place in these regions, especially economic zones exist in several parts of mainland China, most notably in an area of Shanghai, several areas in Guangdong province, and the entire province of Hainan. Finally, autonomous regions, including Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, and Guangxi, were made to give sizable minorities in certain regions of the country more autonomy. However, like Russia, the amount of autonomy these places have is a lot less in practice. The only region to have an absolute majority of the native ethnic group is Tibet, with over 90% of the region being Tibetan. However, Uighurs make 46% in Xinjiang, and are the largest ethnicity there. The other three, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, and Guangxi, have sizable minorities of Mongol, Hui, or Muslim Chinese, and Zhuang, respectively, living in their borders, while Han Chinese maintain the majority in all three. And if you are part of the hopeful majority of people that made it to the end, please consider liking, subscribing, and hitting the bell so you will never miss another video on politics, government, or history. I'll be making more specific videos about Chinese and Russian politics in the coming weeks, as well as a mystery country's government, so stay tuned for those. Thanks for all your support and the growth of my channel, and have yourself a good day or night.


Okay, so you've heard a lot of things today including from that last fine panel about new technologies, distributed energy resources, digitalists and digital that and I'm telling you it's an exciting new world. Let's return for a minute to that wires and substations network and try to take a look at it in that in that context. We have with us a terrific panel that is going to wrap up and put a capstone on this great discussion today. Laura Mans has done a wires presentations on a number of past occasions. She's the director of the energy practice at Navigant and with a focus on transmission policy technology planning markets and operations. She's a former VP of the Cal ISO and she has worked in restructuring wholesale markets in various places including PJM and ERCOT. I want to especially thank her for being here because Navigant is a new member of wires. Stephen Harper comes to us from Intel regardless of what the slide says. I think we messed that one up I think. He's from Navigant too. I'm sorry. He's from Intel and thanks to the grid wise alliance and Ledeen Fremont, Stephen was able to join us today. He's the global director of environment energy sustainability policy at Intel and in that capacity is responsible for advising senior management and leading companies influencing efforts on a wide variety of topics. He is a University of Colorado and University of Chicago MBA and Stephen is in Washington apparently but I'm delighted to meet him for the first time today and I hope we see a lot more of him in the future. Our third panelist is Tim Ash. Tim is with AES and is going to talk a little bit about storage. He works on a lot of utility system issues and has quite a following I'm finding out. As he discusses batteries and other energy storage technologies I think you'll find his knowledge basically really incredible. He holds a master in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a BA from the U.S. Air Force Academy so another great panel and we're going to try and get to this quickly. I am going to ask Steve Harper to go first because he has a train to catch or a dog to catch or something to catch and I think you need to be out of here in a half hour. Thanks Jim actually I got to be back at my desk at 4 to tell my CEO what our policy position should be on climate change in the new political environment and if I'm not there on time I not only will get fired but he'll probably decide for himself what our policy will be and that's always dangerous as you know if you're a staff person you don't want to let your CEO make decisions you got to tell him you know what the decision should be. Now I appreciate being here my job is an interesting one I cover lots of topics globally we make things as well as operate plants and sell products and so my team and I have a wide range of issues from getting chemicals approved so that we can keep factories open to making sure that our products meet energy efficiency specifications and one of the nice things about Intel over the last four or five years is we are producing a lot more variety of products and we're reaching out into a wide range of new markets including the utility market we've been in the utility market for many years but it's always been servers on the back end and now we're selling a lot of internet of things gateway devices usually in partnership with OEMs but I think most of the utilities that are here have been on the panels are in one way or another customer of ours. One of the things about five or six years ago and I was where I met not met but we met Ledeen started to work smart grid issues and I would go to these conferences and meetings and I always felt that the utility folks were slightly pissed off you know because the term smart grid makes it sound like the grid we've had all these years is done and so we started to use the term smarter grid which sounds less judgmental and I also was in a lot of conversations where people would say well gee you know it's great if the grid became more like the internet oh but by the way the internet gets hacked from time to time so maybe you know there's some negatives as well as positives but I think as a general proposition we feel very strongly that the increased IT content some of the internet of things related some of it just good old-fashioned chips has has been and will continue to be a positive in increasing the services the energy services provided by the grid to our society and I'm going to break down four five or six different areas where I think IT can make a difference. One is in the area of resilience notwithstanding what I said about the hacking issue. The products that our industry sells into the utility industry can help in major ways to improve predictive grade grid maintenance capabilities sensors and analytical software that I think allow operators grid operators transmission system operators to have a lot more visibility to problems that might arise and greater ability to reroute electricity. I know I'm in the what used to be PEPCO region in Montgomery County Maryland and the I used to refer to it as the Panama Electric Power Company because the grid would go down quite frequently the reliability has increased tremendously over the last few years some of which is because they've increased the amount of money spent on trimming trees but a lot of it is an increase in the investment in sensors and IT capability. So I think enhanced visualization ability to spot problems before they occur what we call edge intelligence of the ability to really see out to the very edge of the system and AMI. AMI is huge in terms of fault detection and being able to isolate and rectify problems. Storage is another area where IT can play a big, big role. I was at a conference recently in Atlanta where a partnership we have with General Electric we were working with and talking to a group of folks from various utilities. I think everybody knows about the use of water heaters as a potential storage device in the home but it turns out a lot of other appliances can be designed to be batteries and as part of the two-way transmission of information and power in the grid I think that's going to be something that you'll see more of in the future. The partnership we have is in developing specifications and standards such that there can be a real-time interchange of power from the home to the grid and back and the system can without need for intervention or monitoring on a real-time basis by human being readily see how much power is being transferred, what the quality of that power is, and set up a Bitcoin kind of environment where the accounting can be automated and payments can be automated where they're appropriate. So I think that's one area where IT can really play a big role and I think storage as most of us know or feel advances in storage and battery capabilities is one of the areas where technology in the electrical system, generation and distribution, transmission system has lagged. Renewables. Storage and renewables are inherently interrelated in the need to balance the grid on a second by second basis. I think you're seeing more and more micro grid development or at least pilot projects. Interestingly enough in our experience at least the area or the sector of society where the most work has been done on this area is in the Defense Department and the effort to make facilities, DOD facilities and bases more resilient and more independent of a broader grid. So I think the idea of distributed renewables at least in theory ties also with resilience. I think again at least in theory, a distributed system which can accomplish or accommodate a greater percentage of renewables from the market is inherently more resilient. Another area related to renewables that's very, very important is energy efficiency. One of the things that I've spent a lot of time on not so successfully is trying to convince Congress to pass legislation that would basically create an ownership right for utility customers over their electricity generation or electricity consumption information. With the idea, again we've seen this in a number of states where smart meters have been installed and various forms of ownership and or at least sharing of information with the customer has been tried. You see companies like Opower and a dozen or two dozen other companies arise that sell services to the consumer and in some cases, in many cases, the consumer's business that allows the consumer to take greater control over when they use energy and therefore greater control over their footprint and the cost, you know, what they pay in the monthly bill. So we think, you know, that there's a lot more innovation that can be spurred in our industry if we went to a system nationwide where people had real-time access to what their energy consumption is. Now, of course, a lot of people, me included probably, are not going to take advantage of the full functionality of those kinds of technologies, but I think there is enough known about the market to say that many people well and the advantages and benefits would be significant. There's been a huge amount of progress in building energy management systems and home energy management systems. Everything from CAD systems which allow the modeling of buildings before they're built in terms of their energy envelope, the modeling of renovations before they're commenced to real-time systems for managing the energy envelope of homes and buildings, or of systems. We have, for example, a partnership with Daiken, the Japanese chiller company, which is the largest manufacturer of refrigeration equipment in the world, where they are selling commercial chillers that have our sensors and our CPUs and our energy gateways or data gateways implemented on their devices such that if you own a lot of commercial real estate and you've got 2,000 chillers around the world that are sitting on warehouse roofs or building roofs that you can sit in your office wherever and monitor on a real-time basis how those machines are operating and you can set them and operate them to optimize for energy efficiency or pretty much any other parameter you want to. And importantly, they also are able to do predictive maintenance so they manage and monitor system operation in a way that they can spot signals which suggest that some aspect of the system is going to go down and repairs can be affected before the systems actually do go down. So I think that's a pretty exciting example and just one example of building energy management technologies that are out there. And then finally, just in the area of sustainability, a lot of the data that systems like this entail are lodged in the cloud. The cloud is a buzzword, big data is a buzzword. The cloud has been around in one form or another for many, many years. But one of the things that we're excited about because 98% of the servers in the world run on our chips is that the cloud is inherently more sustainable, more energy efficient and more carbon, less carbon intensive than non-cloud solutions, you know, the old habit of companies to operate their own data centers or offices to have a closet, you know, in the back corner of the office where you had a couple of computers which operated as servers very inefficiently. So the move of all this big data into the cloud is in and of itself a benefit to society. And then finally, two last thoughts. Number one, another buzzword, smart cities. You know, everybody would love to see a systematic approach, a systems approach at the city level or at the national level of the implementation of these systems, whether it's a smart grid or other kinds of smart city technology. As one of the previous speakers mentioned, there are lots of reasons why these things tend to happen from the ground up rather than to top down in our society. And whether that's good or bad, I think it's probably good. It does mean that the rollout of these technologies in a systematic way is slower, but that also allows for learning. That also allows for later adopters to learn the lessons of early adopters and save time and money in adopting the technologies. And then the final thing is we believe very strongly in any number of these areas, you know, there's this trade off very often in society between technology and jobs. And you know, one of the big questions for economists today and for policymakers is where are the jobs going to come from that will replace the jobs that are being displaced by various forms of automation? We think in this area there actually is going to be job creation, net, net, net job creation rather than job destruction, we'll see over time. But we also think that if the systems are put in place to educate sufficient numbers of people that these will be high-pay jobs, these will be, you know, good, solid middle-class jobs, and I think given the economics of the country today, that in and of itself is a very positive attribute of these technologies. Thank you. Go backwards. There I am. I'm Laura Mans. I now work for Navigant. I've worked for just about everybody at some point. I've been a grid operator, a grid planner. I know how to do all that stuff that they said they didn't know how to do. And I've also worked on the distribution side. I got to the privilege of working at Viridity Energy for Audrey Zibelman before she went to New York. And my favorite quote from Byron Washam is that he has a Mensa grid in San Diego, which is my hometown. So we have a lot of fun. I have a question for the audience since it's late in the day, and I'm going to have a war story comparison with Rob Granlick because my flight's been canceled to go home. So I'm going to be on the next red eye. Who in this room would today just hop in a self-driving car? Who thinks maybe five to 10 years out they might give it a try? And who thinks, hmm, it ain't going to happen? All right. That's where we are with the power grid today. We have a lot of capabilities that are new. The utilities are sort of like, hmm, self-driving grid. I don't know. Now I'm a race car driver. I'm a driving instructor. I'm not getting in a self-driving car. But five to 10 years from now might do that. And so I just want to offer that advanced technology is going to need a couple of things. First of all, it's going to need the financial, the values aligned with what the grid can do. And we've had some conversations today, but I really think the whole rate making on the transmission piece and also the markets on how you couple the value of generation all the way to the value of load is going to be important. And then how you get that value of load, which we know how to do on the bulk grid, the transmission grid, all the way through to the distribution appliances and components is our future. And that's where we're headed. We're not close yet, but we I think have some, we have some possibilities. The other thing that I think we need to do is work past traditional. Now I spent last summer working on New York Rev as an engagement group facilitator for figuring out what is renewing the energy vision. And the things that we started to talk about were, how do you use non-wires alternatives? And to me, some of the funny things were some of the advanced technologies like our friends at SmartWires, they are a transmission non-wires alternative. And so you start thinking about, well, what does this really mean? What it means is that we want to use every tool in our toolbox to use the assets that we have in a wonderful way. I've also been working lately on FERC's Brightline test and distributed energy. And there are the seven-factor tests. And I always tell people, we'll just go to the seven-factor test. Well, the seven-factor test says, and power only flows in one direction. Well, now power's flowing back in the other direction. And so we are in this cloud, this hopefully conundrum that turns into something that modifies our thinking and really transforms our thinking. So it's a paradigm shift. And so the things that we are taking out of advanced technology, and it's funny to me because when I was a grid operator, a lot of our technology to operate the power grid came out of the space program. We are not innovators necessarily in our bones in the power utility industry, but we're really good at adapting other technologies into our own grid. And so what I see now are the cars, I think self-driving cars are the analogy that I want to use. All this control, all this self-control, self-healing, all of that is probably where we're going to head. I've done nothing to talk about what Navigant sent me here to talk about, but hopefully this is more interesting. So customers, I'm not even going to read off the slides. I mean, this is essentially it, is that customers are going to use the grid in a way that's completely different, it's completely new, and it's changing the way we think about the grid. Incumbent utilities are going to have to adapt. They're going to have to figure out how do you deal with power coming back on the grid? How do we solve the safety issues and deal with that? The other thing that I think is a significant paradigm shift is that we are trying to keep the grid reliable. We're trying to do all the traditional planning we've done. We're trying to bake in now what we call hardening. So it's protecting from cyber attacks. It's protecting from weather like Hurricane Sandy. The other thing that is transformational is we're building in resiliency. We go, all right, what if it does all come apart? How quickly can we put this back together? And that's a new way of thinking about the grid. The grid is something that can be quickly reassembled. There's definitely a world for microgrids. I'm really glad that everyone else in this room had their last blackout in 2003. Mine was in 2011 in San Diego, and we were in the dark. One of the nice things about that San Diego blackout is that we have the Navy, thank you to the Navy, because they can backfeed into the power grid and put San Diego back up. And also the microgrid at UC San Diego, which has self-starting capability. And they can put the grid in San Diego back up. So where we are is kind of the beginning of the change. We have a long line out to the desert, Borego. I don't know if you've ever been out to Palm Springs, but it's sort of like out there past San Diego. You have to go over these huge mountains to get out there. People are saying, it's not worth it to build another transmission line. Let's build a microgrid, let's stand that up. Let's tap into some of the local supply and solar power and things. So we're in the beginning of a change. I'll offer that the new technologies that are gonna get us there are the things that provide situational awareness. We know things now that we never knew before. They have fancy stuff called hardware in the loop. And that means there's a device sitting out on the grid that's telling you in real time what's happening in the system. A totally different way of planning than when I was a grid operator, as you can imagine. So we have all this data, now we have to do something with the data. So that's the next challenge is how do we process all this information coming in? Where are the new computers? Where are the new algorithms? Where are the fast ways to manage big data? I'm gonna offer that me as a 60 hertz gal. I don't have that answer, but I know it has to be answered. And so once we have the awareness, once we have the processing, then we have the control. That's the grid of the future. And so my slide here, which will include smart wires, is to talk about these technologies. Once you have the awareness, the analysis, you can then start feeding these devices and other devices to essentially have the grid start organizing itself. And so that to me is the self-driving car.  I think I'm supposed to mention the cloud of information. I don't know what that is exactly. But it's the big data. Where the big data lives. So, and in the end of it, it's all seamless. So that's the other thing. When I was first starting my career, we talked about a grid that went all the way through, and this was back in the 80s, and it was really innovative. But here we are, and the grid really is all the way connected and talking and on its way. So I wish you a smart, healthy, self-driving grid. Thank you. All right, I've frightened everyone away from the podium. All right, I am Tim Ash. I'm a Market Director with AS Energy Storage. We're headquartered just across the river in Arlington, Virginia. And I believe I am the last presenter for the day. So I promise to not keep you any longer from that hot coffee or cold beverage or your family or plane ride. Scotch and cigars. So really one simple message, I guess, as we wrap up the day from the perspective of an energy storage provider, is that, one, energy storage is a transmission technology. Two, energy storage can and should be treated as transmission assets under current regulatory regimes. And three, deploying energy storage as transmission will improve resiliency of the transmission grid and reduce costs. So if you remember that tomorrow or even 30 minutes from now while you're sipping Scotch and having a cigar, you succeeded. So to be clear, AS Energy Storage, when we talk about energy storage, I'm talking about batteries on the grid. Lots of batteries, the same batteries that are in your electric vehicle or in your friend's electric vehicle, aggregated into a big building. So lots of batteries in a big building at scales that are similar to a gas plant. Why energy storage? Why is it happening now? First, there's a trend to electrify everything. Electricity is becoming the motive force in our economy in more and more ways. If you look at the deployment of electric vehicles and the use of electricity for transportation, that's really the next big wave. So what's happening on the load side is you're getting more unpredictability on load. At the same time, renewables are accelerating. Regardless of where policy goes, the economics are taking over. Renewables are here with us. They will continue to grow and grow quickly. So now it's more unpredictable on the generation side. Energy storage is increasingly the solution because essentially by putting energy storage into the grid, you give it the flexibility it needs to live in that new age. The reason it's happening now is because energy storage technology has matured. It's proven in terms of performance, the cost of decline rapidly in large part because of the scale you're getting from all those lithium ion batteries in your cell phones and all the lithium ion batteries in your cars and in your airplanes and everywhere else. So it's here now and you're really at the tipping point. You'll see exponential growth in the near future. And the last point is just why? Why is energy storage helpful in the transmission network? And we recently did some work with IHS looking at a range of different distribution networks, everything from food to natural gas to communications to transportation. And bottom line is storage in the network makes it more resilient, makes it more responsive, makes it more efficient. Storage in any network delivers those capabilities. It's the same if you're delivering electrons or delivering frozen fish. If you compare the amount of energy storage that's in our transmission and distribution networks today compared to other networks, you see that little dot on the bottom left-hand side of this page. You have the equivalent of about 20 minutes worth of storage if you look at the entire energy storage system in the United States. Most of that is pump hydro storage that was built back in the 50s and 60s to support nuclear as it came online. Very little of that is battery-based energy storage like we're deploying or compressed air or the many other technologies that are out there. But again, the tool is there, it's mature, it's growing quickly, and it will increasingly be seen as and deployed as a transmission asset. Happy to have a much longer conversation as it's helpful. Again, we're just across the river. Thank you very much and I hope you enjoyed the day. Well, I hope you have a half hour of questions for Tim. Actually, we're past our time. I want to appreciate your patience. Jim Lucere is still here. Sugandar is still here. If you have questions for them, you're certainly welcome to raise them. But it's been, I think, a very fruitful day from my perspective. Any questions for Tim? Yes. Oh, here, let's use the mic. All right, when you talk about battery, is it basically for industrial or is it also include residential? So energy storage is being deployed kind of across the network. AES as an electric power company, our focus has really been on deploying storage as a grid resource, so in the transmission network or in the distribution networks. There are other companies focused on residential energy storage like a STEM or Tesla. You're seeing increasingly commercial applications as well. But what we really focus on and where we've been deploying storage is within the electric power grid itself. Jim. Well, can you, yeah, Tim, a fascinating presentation and I drive by your building whenever I go through Arlington, so I appreciate the local focus on this. Question one, what sort of storage projects would you be working on within the states and where does the United States stand with respect to other countries as far as deployment of storage goes? Yeah, those are good questions. The primary market for energy storage in the US has been California to date. They have a mandate to deploy, I think it's around 1,300 megawatts of energy storage by I think it's 2020 or 2021. So that's really been the largest market in the US. The PGM interconnection has been probably the second largest where energy storage has been deployed as a frequency regulation resource, primarily as merchant resources in that market. Next up, I think will be Massachusetts. They have a state mandate for energy storage that should come online, I believe, by July of this year. But several other states are looking at it to include Maryland and a few others. In terms of where the US stands compared to others, if you look at actual deployments, the US is the largest market so far for grid-scale energy storage resources, likely to continue to be so, mainly just because the size of the electric power network here in the US lends itself to that. And again, California in particular with their mandate has really kind of sparked, that and PGM have really sparked growth in the US. Yes, ma'am. I'm just curious. We had the electric car about the mid-1800s. Before the combustion engine. And in a recently written autobiography, Vick Cahn and Doyle, he built an all-electric house in the mid-1800s, relying on batteries. So I'm wondering, where were we then in comparison to where we're going today and how might we have gotten there sooner? Yeah, that's a great question. Our CTO actually wrote an article recently as well, which cited some notes from Thomas Edison, where it was, I think maybe from Pearl Street Station, but essentially they had batteries in the network then and we're thinking about the use of energy storage and its flexibility at the very beginning of the growth of the electric power distribution transmission grids as well. What's changed now and kind of where we stand today is really the technology has matured in terms of both performance and price, global supply chain. So from a commercial perspective, at least battery-based energy storage in our view has matured in the past few years. So I think that's allowing it to grow. And then second is just the grid now, as it's more interconnected, as you have more variability, it looks a little bit different and so the need for that flexibility is growing now as well. I'm not sure how we could have sped it up before now, but we certainly hope to speed it up going forward. I think some slight tweaks to existing market rules and more experience among utilities and grid operators with storage will make this, make energy storage really take off in the near future. Yes. Thanks, hi. Pascha ACEEEEEE. I had a question actually for Mr. Lucier. You had made a great comment about fortune cookies I wanted to touch on. Talked about the fortune cookie slips and it was a comical note about how the somewhat arbitrary nature of the proxy groups are forming the DCF analysis by FERC. And my question was, I think there's kind of a serious element to it as well, which is that those that are excluded from the proxy groups tend to be higher ROE. So my question is, wouldn't it kind of solve some of the problems if we were to reconsider how we form those proxy groups and include those outliers that are excluded from the groups that tend to have the higher ROEs and therefore bring in more investment that we were hoping for? Well, I have a good friend in the power business, actually a lobbyist for many of the major utility companies and he has a great description of what the proxy group is like. He calls it a knife fight. It's the toughest night fight in the industry because you're trying to figure out not only who goes in the proxy group, but who comes out of the proxy group. And it becomes essentially an arbitrary political process. My father worked in Capitol Hill for 30 years and told me that the thing he learned about, the thing he learned from working in the US Senate for three decades was that decisions get made first and rationalized afterward. I mean, if you look at Christie's wonderful diagram here showing the target rate that FERC's model generates and the reality is that regulators know what rates are necessary most of the time to actually get something built. So the question is, how do you rationalize a decision and make sure that you've got at least some market basis? You know, I think you could streamline the system in any number of ways. Either go for more rapid or widespread application of formula rates. Have some sort of federal equivalent of a formula rate just making up as I go along here. You know, other states have looked at rates that reset periodically. The opportunity that FERC has is, you know, their response to the DC Circuit vacator of Order 531 where, you know, FERC has asked to justify its decision to choose something that is in the midpoint of the upper range. You know, why did they do that? At least with the two-stage DCF calculation they were taking some of the uncertainty out of the process. So I think we've got an opportunity now for people to put on their hats and try to figure out what is gonna be the more streamlined, predictable, less random type of process. And I'm not sure I have a good answer, but I think that the nature of the problem is very, very apparent that these decisions are protracted, they're complicated, they're opaque and they get litigated forever and ever and ever and ever. And none of these are constructive developments. Yeah, I would add to that that the WIRE's group sent a petition to FERC in 2013 asking for greater predictability in the setting of ROEs and what we got as a result was Order 531 or Opinion 531, which seemed like a big improvement at the time. But as our speakers suggested today, there is still a lot of unpredictability in the system and regulators sort of understand that intuitively. I remember back in my days on the staff at the commission we used to joke about the rate of return dartboard and that they probably got about the same results. But I appreciate Jim's observations and to Christie's as well. Any other questions today? Okay, yes, Jenny. From investor perspective, they look for certainty, they look for kind of, you know, mitigate the risk and the policy makers are actually stirring up all of the dust and create all kinds of uncertainty. So as a former regulator, now the council and founder for the WIRE's group, how do you kind of know balance that and try to mitigate the risk and have the investor have the confidence actually from the capital market, really put money in this investment and projects. It's the most complicated industry, most risk, who pays for it and how they're going to pay it and you know, how much actually risk premium you have to build into and let the regulator understand it. All of the questions are big question mark and you know, before you have the answer, don't expect investor really jumping into it. I'm sorry to tell you. Well, investors have in fact found transmission to be a good investment but it does tie up a lot of capital for a long period of time. You have to have a strong stomach, you know, to get into transmission investment. I think what Tim has suggested that there are ways that you can make an impact on the system and improve the system with what we call non-wire technologies, although they're not really non-wire, they're wire related, I guess a better way to put it. But yeah, one of the distinguishing characteristics of being a former chairman is that you have absolutely no say as to how regulators minimize risk other than taking an association like wires or the Electric Manufacturers Association or the Grid-Wise Alliance and trying to present them with the best possible ideas. And that's not just for FERC. State regulators are involved in this in a major way and our friends across the street in Congress are going to be bigger and bigger players if they take infrastructure seriously. But they're the decision makers and that's what today's meeting is all about. You have to recognize the risk and you have to develop a strategy for addressing it. And I know that you've been an observer of this industry for a while and a lot of the problems like who pays for transmission, how do costs get allocated, how do we overcome some of these siting problems, and how do we implement incentives and a more streamlined way of setting ROEs. All of those issues are still around. They were around 10 years ago and they're still around. And we're working on it. That's all I can tell you. Let me just close with a couple of remarks. And then I just want to express my thanks to everybody here for sticking it out all day. I think it's been very productive from my standpoint. I will say that this entire session, morning and afternoon, has been videotaped and we will post this on our website. And I think maybe EASI will post it as well. And the PowerPoints will be available. You can sit through this again and I strongly suggest that if our individual panelists raise questions that you want answered that you contact them directly because they're very smart people. There are a few takeaways at least that I have. Certainly somebody made the comment that linear infrastructure is always controversial. And we know that inherently and we tried not to spend a whole lot of time today talking about how complicated and sometimes dysfunctional the regulatory system is because there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen when it comes to approving a transmission, permitting transmission. And a lot of that is just baked in the cake. I don't think that Congress is going to rejigger the allocation of jurisdictional responsibilities to regulate the transmission system. We're just gonna have to find ways to make it better and to do what Jenny suggested which is to minimize risk. I think you heard that the future is electric. A lot of people and Tim made that point quite bluntly. The penetration of electricity, electric energy into the economy, into the way we live, into the way we manufacture things, how we transport things is going to be greater in the years to come. That to me places a premium on investment and infrastructure, particularly transmission but new technologies, distribution and generation. We just need to find a way to plan it all better so we aren't spending more money than we absolutely need to. Transmission I think is recognized by most of our panelists today as one major way that we can preserve optionality for the electric system. We can't see down the road real far. We can do scenario planning but we can certainly make sure that the grid is robust and capable of adapting to new technologies, to new economic realities as time goes on. So I think that it's a very critical infrastructure from that standpoint. I think what we heard today is that distributed energy resources and new technologies are a compliment to transmission and can improve the way the grid works and the grid is gonna be asked to do a whole lot of things in the future that it wasn't designed to do in 1960, in 1970 when it was built. And it's already really supporting bulk power markets that are continuing to evolve. I think we heard that paying attention to stakeholder needs. This is probably the most overstakeholder industry I can think of. I can't imagine if FERC could have more stakeholder meetings or states or RTOs could have more stakeholder meetings but we're gonna have to do more of that and we're gonna have to ensure that the public has an understanding of what the benefits to them will be in the future. So it's kind of a day at a time but I think there's a lot of room here for recognizing the direction this is heading in. And the fact that renewable energy, more diverse energy resources are gonna be critical and are going to have to be accommodated by the grid. So it's worth talking about the things we brought up today other than simply griping about regulation. We've talked about the importance of investment to labor. We've talked about new technology, certainly spent a lot of time on that, that international trade, particularly in North America, certainly including Canada now but potentially Mexico is going to be a real job creator and a boon to the economy. And we talked about markets, sort of. We don't talk about that enough. Transmission supports bulk power markets and bulk power markets is where we're achieving enormous savings now over what we had in the past. So there's a lot of value to deliver and I hope you carry that message. I just wanted to close by saying thank you to Carol Werner and her folks, Amari Laport and Carol's right over here. This is the EESI folks that done a great job to Julie Russell over here who backs me up on everything at Wires and Cassidy who unfortunately had to go back to the office and pay attention to some other clients of mine. So thank you all for being here.


Section 16 of the Ladies' Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia. We soon left Port Phillip far behind, and in a few days saw nothing but a vast expanse of water all around us. Our vessel was filled with returning diggers, and it is worthwhile to remark that only two had been unsuccessful, and these had only been at the diggings a few days. One family on board interested me very much, and consisted of father, mother, and two children. The eldest, a little girl, had been born some time before they had left England. Her brother was a sturdy fellow of two years old, born in the colonies soon after their arrival. He could just huddle about the deck, where he was everlastingly looking for dole and nuggets. The whole family had been at the diggings for nine months, and were returning with something more than £2,000 worth of gold. In England it had been hard work to obtain sufficient food for the most constant labour. They had good reason to be thankful for the discovery of the gold fields. Saturday, November 27, was 48 hours long, or two days of the same name and date. Sailing right round the world in the direction of from west to east, we gained exactly 24 hours upon those who stay at home. And we were therefore obliged to make one day double to prevent finding ourselves wrong in our dates and days on our arrival in England. Melbourne is about 10 hours before London, and therefore night and day are reversed. Rapidly it became cooler, for the winds were rather contrary, and drove us much farther south than was needed. We were glad to avail ourselves of our opossum rugs to keep ourselves warm. One of these rugs is quite sufficient covering overnight in the coldest weather, and in parts as much heat as a dozen blankets. They are made from the skins of the opossums, sewn together by the natives with the sinews of the same animal. Each skin is about 12 inches by 8 or smaller, and as the rugs are generally very large, they contain sometimes as many as 80 skins. They may be tastefully arranged, as there is a great difference in the colours, some being like a rich sable, others nearly black, and others again over grey and light brown. The fur is long and silky. At one time a rug of this description was cheap enough, perhaps as much as two sovereigns, but the great demand of them by diggers, etc., has made them much more scarce, and it now requires a 10-pound note to get a good one. The best come from Van Diemen's land. In summer they are disagreeable, as they harbour insects. However, whilst rounding Cape Horn in the coldest weather I ever experienced, we were only too happy to throw them over us during the nights. One morning we were awakened by great confusion on deck. Our ship was plowing through a quantity of broken ice. That same afternoon we sighted an immense iceberg about 10 miles from us. Its size may be imagined from the fact that although we were sailing at a rate of 10 knots an hour, we kept it in sight till dark. This was on the 3rd of December. We soon rounded the horn and had some very rough weather. One of the sailors fell off the jib boom and the cry of a man overboard made our hearts beat with horror. Every sail was on. We were running right before the wind and the waves were mountains high. A boat must have been swamped and long before we could boat ship he had sunk to rise no more. After rounding Cape Horn we made rapid progress. By Christmas Day we were in the tropics. It was not kept with much joe-vilty. The water and food were running scarce. Provisions were so dear in Melbourne that they had laid in a short allowance of everything and our captain had not anticipated half so many passengers. We tried therefore to put into St Helena. The contrary winds prevented us. We sailed back again to the South American coast and anchored off Pernambuco. It was providential that economical intentions made our captain prefer this port. But had we touched at Rio we should have encountered the yellow fever which we afterwards heard was raging there. Pernambuco is apparently a very pretty place. We were anchored about four miles from the town so had a good view of the coast. I longed to be on shore to ramble beneath the elegant coconut trees. The weather was intensely hot for it was in the commencement of January and the boats full of fruit sent from the shore for sail were soon emptied by us. I called them boats but they are properly termed catamarans. They are made of logs of wood lashed securely together. They have a sail and oars but no sides so the water rushes over and threatens every moment to engulf the frail conveyance. But no the wood is too light for that. The fruits brought us from shore were oranges, pineapples, watermelons, limes, bananas, coconuts etc and some yams which were a good substitute for potatoes. The fruit was all very good and astonishingly cheap. Our oranges being green lasted till we reached England. Some of our passengers went on shore and returned with marvellous accounts of the dirtiness and narrowness of the streets and the extremely natural costume of the natives. We remained here about four days and then with favourable winds pursued our voyage at an average rate of 10 or 12 knots an hour. As we near the English coast our excitement increased to an awful height and for those who had been many years away I can imagine every trivial delay was fraught with anxiety. But we come in sight of land and in spite of the cold weather for it is now February 1853 everyone rushes to the deck. On we go at last we are in the downs and then the wind turned right against us. Boats were put off from the deal beach. The boatmen were rightly calculated that lucky gold diggers wouldn't mind paying a pound apiece to get ashore so they charged that and got plenty of customers notwithstanding. On Sunday the 27th of February I gained set foot on my native land. It was evening when we reached the shore and there was only an open vehicle to convey us to the town of Deal itself. The evening was bitterly cold and the snow lay upon the ground as we proceeded along the sands of the Sabbath bell broke softly on the air. No greeting could have been more pleasing or more congenial to my feelings. End of section 16 Section 17 of a lady's visit to the gold diggings of Australia. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. A lady's visit to the gold diggings of Australia by Ellen Casey. Section 17. Conclusion As I trust that in the foregoing pages I have slightly interested my readers in our party. The following additional account of their movements containing letters addressed to me by my brother may not be quite uninteresting. The oven's diggings are on the river of the same name which takes its rise in the Australian Alps and flows into the Murray. As these Alps separate New South Wales from Victoria these diggings belong to the latter province. They are about 40 miles from the town of Albury. They are spread over a large base of ground. The principal locality thus bring and reads Creek. Now for the letters. Melbourne, January the 5th, 1853 My Dear E You'll be surprised at the heading of this but the ovens are not to my taste and I'm off again with Frank and Octavius to Bendigo tomorrow. I suppose you'd like to hear of our adventures up to the ovens and the reasons for this sudden change of plans. We left Melbourne the Monday after you sailed and camped out halfway to Kilmore a little beyond the lady of the lake. The day was fine but the dust made us wretched. Next day we reached Kilmore, stopped there all night. Next day I went again and the further we went the more uncivilised it became. Hills here, forests there as wild and savage as anyone could desire. It was bushing it with a vengeance. This lasted several days. Once we lost our road and came by good luck to a sort of station. They received this very hospitably and set us right next morning. Four days after we came to the Golden River. There was a punt to take us over and a host of people many from Bendigo waiting to cross. Three days after we pitched our tents at the ovens. Here I soon saw it was no go. There was too much water and too little gold and even if they could knock the first difficulty on the head I don't think they could do the same to the second. In my own mind I think it impossible that the ovens will ever turn out the second Bendigo that many imagine. Hundreds differ from me therefore it's hundreds to one that I'm wrong. The average wages as far as I can judge are an ounce a week some much more many much less. We did not attempt digging ourself Eaglehawk shallowness as sportive. For not even Octavius, who you know of old was a harder worker than either Frank or self thinks it's worth digging through 14 or 16 feet of hard clay for the mere pleasure of exercising our limbs. Provisions there were not at the high price that many suppose they would be but quite high enough heaven knows. Meat was very scarce and bad and flour all but a shilling a pound and if the fresh arrivals keep flocking in and no greater supply of food it will get higher still. We stayed there two weeks then bought our tray back again and are now busy getting ready for a fresh dart to Bendigo. Among other things we shall take are lemonade and ginger beer powders a profitable investment though laughable. The weather is very hot fancy 103 degrees in the shade water is getting scarce. Have seen all our friends in Melbourne except Richard who left for England a fortnight ago. Jesse as well and growing quite pretty. She says she is extremely happy and sends such a number of messages to you that I'll write none for fear of making a mistake. We'll write again soon. Your affectionate brother in haste. Melbourne April the 17th 1853. My dear E.  But I've been so occupied with the worship of man as to have little thoughts for anything else. We made a good thing of our last two speculations ginger beer and lemonade or lemon-carly at six months a tiny glass paid well. A successful deer would drink off a dozen one after another. Some days we have taken ten pounds in six pence at this fun. What they bought of us wouldn't harm them but many mix up all sorts of injurious articles to sell. But our consciences thank God are not colonised sufficiently for that. We have had steady good luck in the digging line for we combine everything and after this next trip mean to dissolve partnership. Obtavious talks of going out as overseer or something of that sort to some squatter in New South Wales for a year or so just to learn the system etc. and then if possible take a sheep run himself. Frank means to send for Mrs. Frank and Small Co. He says you shall stay in Victoria for some years. I do believe he likes the colony. As for myself I hope to see the last of it in six weeks time. Hurrah for Old England, no place like it. You're very affectionate brother. With a cordial assent to the last few words I conclude these pages. End of section 17 Section 18 Have a ladies visit to the gold diggings of Australia. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org A ladies visit to the gold diggings of Australia by Alan Clancy. Section 18 Appendix Who Should Immigrate The question of who should immigrate has now become one of such importance owing to the number who are desirous in their native land to seek assurer means of subsidence in our vast colonial possessions that any book creating of Australia would be sadly deficient were a subject of such universal interest to be left unnoticed and where there are so many of various capabilities means and dispositions in need of guidance and advice as to the advantage of their immigrating. It is probable that the experience of any one however slight that experience may be will be useful to some. Anyone to succeed in the colonies must take with him a quantity of self-reliance, energy and perseverance. This is the best capital a man can have. Let none rely upon introductions. They are but useless things at the best. They may get you invited to a good dinner but now that fresh arrivals in Melbourne are so much more numerous than here to fall I almost doubt if they would do even that. A quick clever fella with a trade of his own endued to labour and with a light heart that can laugh at many privations which the gypsy sort of life he must lead in the colonies will entail upon him. Any one of this description cannot fail to get on but for the number of clerks, shopmen etc. who daily arrive in Australia there is a worse chance of their gaining a livelihood than if they had remained at home. With this description of labour the colony market is largely overstopped and it is distressing to notice the number of young men incapable of severe manual labour who with delicate health and probably still more delicately filled purses swarm the towns in search of employment and are exposed to heavy expenses which they can earn nothing to meet. Such men have rarely been successful at the diggings. The demand for them in their accustomed pursuits is very limited in proportion to their numbers. They gradually sink into extreme poverty too often into reckless or criminal habits till they disappear from the streets to make way for others similarly unfortunate. A little while since I met with the histories of two individuals belonging to two very different classes of immigrants and they are so applicable to this subject that I cannot forbear repeating them. The first account is that of a gentleman who went to Melbourne some eight months ago carrying with him a stock of elegant acquirements and accomplishments but little capital. He is now in a starving condition almost without the hope of extrication and is imploring from his friends the means to return to England if he lived long enough to receive them. The colours in which he paints the colonies are plurable in the extreme. The other account is that of a compositor who immigrated much about the same time. He writes to his former office mates that he got immediate and constant employment at the rate of seven pounds per week and naturally thinks that there is no place under the sun like Melbourne. Both immigrants are right. There is no better place under the sun than Melbourne for those who can do precisely what the Melbourne people want and which they must and will have at any price but there is no worse colony to which those can go who have not the capabilities required by the Melbourne people. They are useless and in the way their accomplishments are disregarded. Their misfortunes receive no pity and whilst a good carpenter or bricklayer would make a fortune a modern Raphael might starve. But even those possessed of every qualification for making first class colonists will at first meet with much to surprise and annoy them and will need all the energy they possess to enable them to overcome the many disagreeables which encounter them as soon as they arrive. Let us, for example, suppose the case of an immigrant with no particular profession or business but having a strong constitution good common sense and a determination to bear up against every hardship so that in the end it leads him to independence. Let us follow him through the difficulties that bewildered the stranger in Melbourne during the first few days of his arrival. The commencement of his dilemmas will be that of getting his luggage from the ship and so quickly do the demands for pounds and shillings fall upon him that he is ready to wish he had pitched up his traps overboard. However, we will suppose him at length safely landed on the wharf at Melbourne and all his boxes beside him. He inquires for a store and learns that there are plenty close at hand and then forgetting that he is in the colonies he looks round for a porter and truck and looks in vain. After waiting as patiently as he can for about a couple of hours he manages to hire an empty cart and driver. The latter lifts the boxes into the conveyance expecting, of course, his employer to lend a hand smacks his whip and turns down street after street till he reaches a tall grim looking building in front of which he stops with a, that's her a store and a demand for a sovereign more or less. This settle he coolly requests the immigrant to assist him in unloading and leaves him to get his boxes carried inside as best he can. Perhaps some of the storekeeper's men come to the rescue and with their help the luggage is conveyed into the storeroom which is often 60 or 80 feet in length where the owner receives a memorandum of their arrival. Boxes or parcels may remain there in perfect safety for months so long as a shilling a week is paid for each. Our immigrant having left his property in security now turns to seek a lodging for himself and the extreme difficulty of procuring house accommodation with its natural consequences an extraordinary rate of rent startles and amazes him. He searches the city in vain and but takes himself to the suburbs where he procures a small half furnished room in a wooden house for 30 shillings a week. The scarcity of house in proportion to the population is one of the greatest drawbacks to the colony but we could not expect it to be otherwise when we remember that in one year Victoria received an addition of nearly 80,000 inhabitants. The masculine portion of these immigrants with few exceptions started off at once to the diggings hence the deficiency in the labour market is only partially filled up by the few who remain behind and by the fewer still who forsake the gold fields whilst the abundance of money and the deficiency of good workmen have raised the expenses of building far above the point at which it would be a profitable investment for capital. Meantime the want is only partially supplied by the wooden cottages which are daily springing up around the boundaries of the city but this is insufficient to meet the increasing want of shelter and on the southern bank of the Yarra there are four or five thousand people living in tents. This settlement is appropriately called Canvas Town but let us return to our newly arrived immigrant. Having succeeded in obtaining a lodging he proceeds to purchase some necessary articles of food and looks incredulously at the shopkeeper when told the butter is three shillings and sixpence a pound cheese, ham or bacon two shillings to two shillings sixpence and eggs, four shillings or five shillings a dozen. He wisely dispenses with such luxuries and contents himself with bread at one shillings and sixpence the four pound loaf and meat at five pence a pound. He sleeps soundly for the day has been a fatiguing one and next morning with renewed spirits determines to search immediately for employment. He does not much care what it is at first so that he earns something for his purse feels considerably lighter after the many demands upon it yesterday. Before an hour is over he finds himself engaged to a storekeeper at a rate of three pounds a week his business being to load and unload trays, roll casks, lift heavy goods etc and here we will leave him for one sec going he will soon find a better birth if he have capital it is doubtless safely deposited in the bank until a little acquaintance with the colonies enables him to invest it judiciously and meanwhile if wise he will spend every shilling as though it were his last but if his capital consists only of the trifle in his purse no matter the way he is setting to work will soon rectify that deficiency and he stands a good chance in a few years of returning to England a comparatively wealthy man. To those of my own sex who desire to emigrate to Australia I say do so by all means if you can go under suitable protection possess good help and not fastidious or fine lady like can milk cows, churn butter cook a good damper and mix a pudding the worst risk you run is that of getting married and finding yourself treated with twenty times the respect and consideration you may meet within England here as far as number goes women beat the lords of creation in Australia it is the reverse and there we may be pretty sure of having our own way but to those ladies who cannot wait upon themselves and whose fair fingers are unused to the exertion of doing anything useful my advice is for your own sakes remain at home rich or poor it is all the same for those who can afford to give forty pounds a year to a female servant will scarcely know whether to be pleased or not at the acquisition so idle and impertinent are they scold them and they will tell you that next week Tom or Bill or Harry will be back from the diggings and then they'll be married and wear silk dresses and be as final lady as yourself and with some such words will coolly dismiss themselves from your service leaving their poor unfortunate mistress uncertain whether to be glad of their departure or ready to cry because there's nothing prepared for dinner and she knows not what to set out about first for those who wish to invest small sums in goods for Australia boots and shoes, cutlery, flash-dury watches, pistols particularly revolvers gunpowder, fancy articles, cheap laces and baby linen offer immense profits the police in Victoria is very inefficient both in the towns and on the roads fifteen persons were stopped during the same afternoon whilst travelling on the highway between Melbourne and St Kilda they were robbed and tied to trees within sight of each other this too in broad daylight on the roads to the diggings it is still worse and no one intending to turn digger should leave England without a good supply of firearms in less than one week more than a dozen robberies occurred between Kighton and Forrest Creek two of which terminated in murder the diggings themselves are comparatively safe quite as much so as Melbourne itself and there is a freemasonry in the bush which possesses an irresistible charm for adventurous bachelors and causes them to prefer the risk of bush rangers to witnessing the dreadful scenes that are daily and hourly enacting in a colonial town life in the bush is wild, free and independent healthy exercise, fine scenery and a clear and buoyant atmosphere maintain an excitement of the spirits and a sanguiness of temperament peculiar to this sort of existence and many other pleasant evenings enlivened with the gay gist or cheerful song which are passed around the bushfires of Australia the latest accounts from the digging speak of them most encouragingly out of a population of 200,000 which is calculated to be the number of the present inhabitants of Victoria half are said to be at the Goldfields and the average earnings are still reckoned at nearly an ounce per man per week Ballarat is again rising into favour and its riches are being more fully developed the gold there is more unequally distributed than at Mount Alexander and therefore the proportion of successful to unsuccessful diggers is not so great as at the latter place but then the individual gains are in some cases greater the labour is also more severe than at the Mount or Bendigo as the gold lies deeper and more numerous trials have to be made before the deposits are struck upon the ovens is admitted to be a rich gold field but the work there is severely labourers owing to a super abundance of water the astonishing mineral wealth of Mount Alexander is evidenced by the large amounts which it continues to yield not withstanding the immense quantities that have already been taken from it the whole country in that neighbourhood appears to be more or less Eurypherius up to the close of last year the total supposed amount of gold procured from the Victoria diggings is 3,998,324 ounces which when calculated at the average English value of four pounds an ounce is worth nearly 16 million sterling one third of this is distinctly authenticated as coming down by escort during the three last months of 1852 in Melbourne the extremes of wealth and poverty meet and many are the antidotes of the lavish expenditure of successful diggers that are circulated throughout the town which shall only relate to which fell under my own observation having occasion to make a few purchases in the linen drapery line I entered a good establishment in Collins Street for that purpose it was before noon for later in the day the shops are so full that to get a trifling order attended to would be almost a miracle there was only one customer in the shop standing beside the counter gazing with extreme dissatisfaction upon a quantity of goods of various colours and materials that lay there for his inspection he was a rough looking customer end up and the appearance of his hands gave strong indication that the pickaxe and spade were among the last tools he had handled it's a shiny thing that I want he was saying as I entered these are what we should call shining goods said the shopman as he held up the silks alpacas etc to the light they're not the shiny sort that I want pursued the digger half doggedly, half angrily I'll find another shop I guess you won't show your best goods to me you think may have I can't pay for them but I can though and he laid a note for 50 pounds adding, maybe you'll show me some shiny stuff now unable to comprehend the wishes of his customer the shopman called to his assistants the master of the establishment who being I suppose a quicker apprehension placed some sentence before him I thought the paper would help you find it I want a gown for my missus what's the price 20 yards of 110 30 pounds that do so no, not good enough was the energetic reply the shrewd shopkeeper quickly fathomed his customers desires and now displayed before him a rich orange coloured satin which elicited an exclamation of delight 25 yards couldn't sell less it's a remnant at 3 pounds the yard that's the go interrupted the digger four notes upon the counter my missus was married in a cotton gown and now shall have a real golden and seizing the satin from the shopkeeper he twisted up the portion that had been unrolled for his inspection placed the hole under his arm and triumphantly walked out at the shop little thinking how he had been cheated a lucky digger that observed the shopman as he attended to my wants I could not feel bare a smile for I've pictured to myself the digger's wife mixing a damper with the sleeves of her dazzling satin dress tucked up above her elbows a few days after a heavy shower drove me to take shelter in a pastry cook's where under the pretense of eating a bun I escaped a good branching hardly had I been seated five minutes when a sailor looking personally jented and addressed the shopwoman with I'm going to be spiced tomorrow young woman show us some large wedding cakes the largest which was but a small one was placed before him and 18 pounds demanded for it he laid down four five pound notes upon the counter and taking up the cake told her to keep the change to buy ribbons with pleasant to have plenty of gold digging friends I remarked by way of saying something not a friend said she smiling I never saw him before I expect he's only a successful digger turn we now to the darker side of this picture my favourite walk whilst in Melbourne was over Princess Bridge and along the road to Lyadet's beach thus passing close to the canvas settlement called Little Adelaide one day about a week before we embarked for England I took my pasta more in this direction and as I passed the tents was much struck by the appearance of a little girl who with a large picture in her arms came to procure some water from a small stream beside the road her dress though clean and neat bespoke extreme poverty and her countenance had a wane sad expression upon it which would have touched the most indifferent beholder and left an impression deeper even than that produced by her extreme no delicate beauty I made a slight attempt at a clientorship by assisting to fill her picture which was far too heavy went full of water for so slight a child to carry and pointing to the rise of ground on which the tents stood I inquired if she lived among them she nodded her head in token of ascent and have you been long here and do you like this country I continued determined to hear if her voice was as pleasing as her countenance no she answered quickly we starve here there was plenty of food when we were in England and then her childish reserve giving way she spoke more fully of her troubles and a sad though a common tale it was some of the particulars I learnt afterwards her father had held an appointment under government and had lived upon the income derived from it for some years when he was tempted to try and do better in the colonies his wife the daughter of a clergyman well educated and who before her marriage had been a governess accompanied him with their three children on arriving in Melbourne which was about three months previous he found that situations equal in value according to the relative prices of food and lodging to that which he had thrown up in England were not so easily procured as he had been led to expect half desperate he went to the diggings leaving his wife with little money and many promises of quick remittances of gold by the escort but week followed week and neither remittances nor letters came they removed to humbler lodgings every little article of value was gradually sold for unused to bodily labour or even to sit for hours at the needle the deserted wife could earn but little then sickness came there were no means of paying for medical advice and one child died after this step by step they became poorer until half a tent in little Adelaide was the only refuge left as we reached it the little girl drew aside the canvas and partly invited me to enter I glanced in it was a dismal sight in one corner lay the mother a blanket her only protection from the human soil and carrying down beside her was her other child I could not enter it seemed like a heartless intrusion upon misery so slipping the contents of my purse which were unfortunately only a few shillings into the little girl's hand I hurried away scarcely waiting to notice the smile that tanked me so eloquently on arriving at home I found that my friends were absent and being detained by business they did not return till after dusk so it was impossible for that day to afford them any assistance early next morning we took a little wine and other trifling articles with us and proceeded to little Adelaide on entering the tent we found that the sorrows of the unfortunate mother were at an end the deprivation, ill health and anxiety had claimed her victim her husband sat beside the corpse and the golden nuggets which in his despair he had flung upon the ground formed a painful contrast to the scene of poverty and death the first six weeks of his career at the Diggings had been most unsuccessful and he had suffered as much from want as his unhappy wife then came a sudden change of fortune and in two weeks more he was comparatively rich he hastened immediately to Melbourne and for a whole week had sought his family in vain at length on the preceding evening he found them only in time to witness the last moments of his life sad as this history may appear it is not so sad as many others, for often instead of returning with gold the digger is never heard of more in England many imagine that the principal labour at the Diggings consist in stooping to pick up the lumps of gold which lie upon the ground at their feet only waiting for someone to take possession of them these people when told of holes being dug in depths of from seven to forty feet before arriving at the desired metal look upon such statements as so many myths or fancy they are fabricated by the lucky gold finders to deter too many others from coming to take a share of the precious soil there was a passenger on board the vessel which took me to Australia who held some such opinions as these and although in other respects a sensible man he used seriously to believe that every day that we were delayed by contrary winds he could have been picking up fifty or a hundred pounds worth of gold had he but been at the Diggings he went to Bendigo the third day after we landed stayed there at a fortnight left it in disgust and returned to England immediately poorer than he had started this is not an isolated case young men of sanguine dispositions read the startling amounts of gold shipped from the colonies they think of the John Bull Nugget and other similar prizes turn a deaf ear when you speak of blanks and determinately overlook the vast amount of labour which the gold Diggings have consumed whenever I meet with this class of would-be immigrants the remarks of an old digger which I once overheard recurred to my mind the conversation at the time was turned upon the subject of the many young men flocking from the old country to the gold fields and their evident unfitness for them every young man before paying his passage money said he should take a few days fell at well-sinking in England if he can stand that comfortably the Diggings won't hurting many are sadly disappointed on arriving in Victoria at being unable to invest their capital or savings in the purchase of about a hundred acres of land sufficient for a small farm I have referred to this subject before but cannot resist adding some facts which bear upon it by return of the land sales of Victoria from 1837 to 1851 it appears that 380,000 acres of land were sold in the whole colony and the sum realised by government was 700,000 pounds in a return published in 1849 it is stated that there were three persons who each held singly more land in their own hands than had been sold to all the rest of the colony in 14 years for which they paid the sum of 30 pounds each per annum yet whilst 700,000 pounds is realised by the sale of land and not a hundred pounds a year gained by letting three times the quantity the colonial government persists in the latter course in spite of the reiterated disapprovation of the colonists themselves by one of the last gazettes of Governor Latrobe he has ordered 681,700 acres or 1,065 square miles to be given over to the squatters the result of this is that many immigrants landing in Victoria are compelled to turn their steps towards the sister colony of Adelaide there was a family who landed in Melbourne whilst I was there it consisted of the parents and several grown up sons and daughters the father had held a small tenant farm in England and having saved a few hundreds determined to invest it in Australian land he brought out with him many agricultural implements an iron horse etc on his arrival found to his dismay that no less than 640 acres of crown lands could be sold at a time at the upset price of one pound an acre this was more than his capital could afford and they left for Adelaide the expenses of getting his goods to and from the ships of storing them, of supporting his family while in Melbourne and of paying their passage to Adelaide amounted almost to a hundred pounds thus he lost nearly a fourth of his capital and Victoria a family who would have made good colonists much is done nowadays to assist immigration but far greater exertions are needed before either the demand of labour in the colonies or the oversupply of it in England can be exhausted thus down the best streets of Melbourne you see one or two good shops or houses and on either side an empty spot or a mass of rubbish the ground has been bought the plans for the proposed building are already then why not commence there are no workmen bricks are wanted and 15 pounds a thousand is offered carpenters are advertised for at 8 pounds a week yet the building makes no progress there are no workmen go down towards the Yarra and an unfinished church will attract attention are funds wanting for its completion no thousands were subscribed in one day and would be again were it necessary but that building like every other is stopped for lack of workmen in vain the bishop himself published an appeal to the various labourers requiring offering the very highest wages others offered higher wages still and the church up to the time I left Victoria remained unfinished and yet whilst labour is so scarce so needed in the colonies there are thousands in our own country able and willing to work our lives here are one of prolonged privation whose eyes are never gladdened by the sight of nature who inhale no purer atmosphere than the tainted air at the dark courts and dismal solace in which they heard send them to the colonies food and pure air would at least be theirs and much misery would be turned into positive happiness I heard of a lady who every year sent out a whole family from the poor but hard working classes to the colonies it was through one of the objects of her thoughtful benevolence that this annual act became known to me and what happiness must it bring when she reflects on the heartfelt blessings that are showered upon her from the far off land of Australia surely among the rich and the influential there are many who, out of the abundance of their wealth could go and do likewise End of section 18 End of A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia by Alan Clacy


Welcome back, this is on the ground in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLES theCUBE. I'm here with Owen Garrett, the head of product, Nginix. Here for a special segment to talk about some of the new upcoming releases, HTTP2, HTTP2 is coming out. Give us a take on this going on. Yeah, there's a chunk of technology we're working on for the next major release. And HTTP2 support is going to be one of the biggest developments. HTTP2 is the standardization of a protocol called speedy. It's something that Google and other players pursued as a way to try and make the web faster and more secure. And finally, the standards are getting locked down in the form of HTTP2. Browsers are beginning to support it and server applications like Nginx are adding in support. It's funny how we get here in this market.  The web scale companies have built their own. So talk about the implications of the standard that just got set and what's coming out in the new release. Sure, so the standard is a complex standard. It's not just a drop in replacement. It requires a lot of engineering. Requires some very, very high quality code to make sure that it's implemented efficiently, effectively and securely. It depends really heavily on SSL for security. That will become a standard for all HTTP2 traffic. And these are areas that we've got a lot of track record in. We've been building this for a technology for many years and we're determined to build out a fantastic high performance, drop in easy to manage solution, so that you can layer HTTP2 on the front of your applications, your APIs, your websites, so that your users can get the confidence that standard's in place. You can stay at the front of technology as it continues to innovate. And we intend to deliver the gateway technology that you need to do that. So take me through this. I want to do a drill down because my mind's spinning. It seems really, really hard to the customer. So thinking with tokens and kind of siloed applications after the run on top of open standards like HTTP and HBS, it seems like a lot of hassle for the customer to go out and update all their apps. It just scares me just to think about, I got this working now. Why would I do this? Why would I go to this next rep? And why should I do it? It seems harder. Yeah, the pace of change in the industry is really quick in the last few years. HTTP itself is a pretty old standard night, over 20 years and for years people have developed tricks and techniques to work around some of the limitations of that standard. HTTP too is an attempt to try and productize that. It's a new layer on top of HTTP that deals with some of the performance issues that are inherent with HTTP. Why would I deploy it on my customer? So if you want to deploy that, if you're getting demand from your end users, they want the security of knowing that your site is running on a secure platform. They want to know that you're delivering the best possible performance. One of the main benefits of HTTP too is the way that clients can send requests to the server. They can ask for things in a much more efficient way. So over in many circumstances, you'll get better performance, faster websites, less delay and there's a really strong correlation between the speed of a website and the amount of time that a user spends on that site and that time often ends up in greater transactions, greater advertising revenue, whatever the KPIs are for your site, performance is something which will help to influence. So let me try to understand this. So if I'm running like Node.js at the edge and I'm running a lot of stuff on the browser, I got memory problems, is that related to this stuff? Is this the right profile customer that would need this? That's the right kind of profile customer. But our approach for HTTP too will be to layer that in front of your Node.js application. You don't need to tweak the application to support HTTP too. You need to put an HTTP2 gateway, a translator in front. That's exactly what we do now for SSL, for speedy. It's a common pattern, well understood and we're extending the product so we'll also be able to do the same for HTTP2. So basically it's nondescriptive to the operations to the customers that you guys have. That's our goal. There's a lot of concern in the industry but higher enterprises gonna move from their current architecture to one that supports HTTP2. And our goal is to provide the tools and to make that transition as easy as possible for them. How big is this gonna be HTTP2? I mean it sounds awesome, we need more security. That's the number one thing people are worried about. Identity theft, losing their credit cards, it's happening all the time, fraud is huge. Obviously big data will help that which is another DevOps movement. But how big will this be in your personal opinion? It's gonna be a significant bit of technology. It's gonna be something that you will need to support as a website operator in order to stay relevant and to stay current. You can't measure the size of the technology. We can make predictions about the adoption. But you feel good about this, it's pretty critical. But it's an important thing to support. It shows the direction that the industry is going in. It's critical infrastructure, HTTP and rounding all the protocol. So we'll be here about this at developer conference in September here in San Francisco. Yep, there's a lot of updates coming at our user conference. So not just around HTTP2, there's a number of other innovations we've got in the product and we're gonna be releasing or showcasing those in September. We're gonna get information on this NGINX website. What are some of the location, URLs, Twitter handles, web addresses? Yeah, come and hit the website, NGINX.com. You'll see as we open, we already have a call for papers. As we open it up for registration, you'll see it advertised through there through NGINX.org, you won't miss it. Oh and Garrett, head of product here in San Francisco, we're on the ground. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. Special CUBE conversation on the ground in San Francisco. Thanks for watching.