Hello everyone and thank you for joining us. My name is Emeline Cheney, I'll be your moderator today. I'm the Regional Advisor on Forest and Climate Change at UN Environment. We have an exciting line map of experts from C4, FAO, UNDP, UN Environment and Indonesia's Ministry of Environment and Forestry here with us today. Each of these experts will give a short presentation and then we'll open the floor for questions from you all. For your information, the webinar will also be recorded so you can review and share it afterwards. And we also encourage you to live tweet or share your thoughts on social media using the hashtag Pete Lens Matter and Forests Matter or tagging C4 or UN Red. Today's topic is on Pete Lens Indonesia and their link to Red Cross and Climate Change mitigation. We will examine why the conservation and restoration of Pete Lens is so crucial from a scientific, environmental, economic and livelihoods point of view and we'll also discuss potential solutions for protecting Pete Lens and preventing their loss in the future. This topic is timely other than ever. I'm sure you will have seen in the news that due to the extreme dry season and despite substantial efforts from the government of Indonesia, the forest and pit fires are back. As of this August, the government has declared a state of emergency in the provinces of Riau, South Sumatra, West Kalimantan, Jambi, South Kalimantan and Central Kalimantan where extensive Pete Lens are particularly prone to fires. And our first speaker today will address the science behind why Pete Lens are so flammable. But let me start off by giving you a quick idea of the link between Red Cross, Indonesia and Pete Lens. So what is Red Cross? It's an acronym and it stands for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. It is a framework under the International Paris Agreement on Climate Change under which developing countries can receive payments for protecting their forests as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Most tropical Pete Lens are forested and they store significant amounts of carbon, about 20 times as much as other types of soil. So the destruction of degradation of forest cover on Pete Lens delivers a double blow of carbon emissions. One from losses, with losses from both the standing biomass trees but also losses from the drying and degradation of pit soils. Indonesia is a key country for Red Cross. It has the third largest area of tropical forest globally. And it's also home to about half of the world's tropical Pete Lens. This past February, Norway announced that it would provide the first result-based payments to Indonesia as part of a Replus Agreement that was signed between the two nations in 2010. This international recognition of Indonesia's efforts in reducing deforestation was really well-merited. Primary forest loss dropped by 60% in 2017 compared to 2016. And the government is planning to continue with this trend and has committed to reducing its emissions by 29% by 2030. This goal, however, will be difficult to attain if forest and pit fires continue to spike every few years. Hence our discussion today. To give you a better picture, emissions from the 2015 fire season in Indonesia have on some days exceeded the average daily emission of the United States. So with that quick background in mind, I will turn over to Johan Kift, lead technical advisor for the UN Red Programme in Indonesia. And his presentation is on fire, the challenge to sustainable management of tropical Pete Lens. Over to you, Johan. Okay, Emilina, thank you very much for your introduction. And my presentation will be about fire. And I have to underline that fire is a key challenge to sustainable management of Pete Lens, both in the tropics as well as in temperate regions of the world. Fire have been common as well in the past in North Western Europe, actually up to the time that even the city of Vienna in 1928 was blanketed with haze, the same as now Singapore's experiences. So as such, this is not a new problem, but it is a problem where I think we have to deal with. Because as we all know and as we all are aware of, fires is creating substantial damage to the economies and as well to the livelihoods and the health of people in Southeast Asia. And as you can see, the impact of fires is both in terms of environment economy and health are significant. We talked in 2015 about 2.6 million hectares burned about an impact on the economy of 16.1 billion dollars, particularly to haze, disturbed transport, trade and tourism. And also in terms of fiscal expenditures towards fire suppression and mobilization of military and police troops to put fires out. The health impacts are significant. The most of these impacts for the people who are suffering from it are EDI, first of all, so that people will feel the impact throughout their lives. And as such, in a cross-cooperation with the Government of Indonesia, we have established the so-called desired state, which we aim that actually we move towards a minimum or as possible as the targets of the government is share of wildfires, ideally by next year or at least by 2025. And that means that we have to restore peak lands, we have health development and drainage of peak lands, we prevent these folks from fires and management, and we need to look at community and we need to engage communities in those efforts to community-based fire prevention and they move towards and so what's called an integrated fire management approach, which brings all these elements together. And that means that we have to create capacity to deal with fires across the landscape and engage all land uses as much as possible. And now I will now explain why are fire pit fires so bad. As Emily explained in the reintroduction, is that you talk about you have fuel in the soil, which in normal fires you don't have. You have mineral soils, mineral soils don't work, but the pit fire is peak consist of carbon, of actually of forest materials preserved on the water, which if drained are then getting exposed to fire. And that means as soon as you get a fire in the surface, on the surface, in the surface in the surface vegetation, then it will lead to actually the fall over of trees. This means that the trees start falling over and then start burning. And that will create, and as we have talked about here, about 150 tons of biomass per hectares, that will then create actually a layer of fuel covering the peat soil. Okay, next slide. And as these vertical trees now are laying on the peat soil, then the sub-surface peat soil that starts to burn and then gradually the fire starts moving into the peat. So the fires are moving into the peat, so it submerges into the soil. Okay, and then it starts burning into the soil and that creates substantial greenhouse gas emissions and as well it creates that effectively the peat disappears, the peat disappears, so the land surface comes down. So, and by coming the land surface is down and the fire intensifiers ultimately, the peat fires ultimately create substantial carbon dioxide emissions, just fuel and accelerating global warming and as explained in the introduction, up to a level of the same level as the overall emissions of the United States as a whole on a daily basis. Okay. And then moving into the water and then burning in and then keeping that sub-surface peat contains large amounts of biofuel up to over 1,000 ton per hectare or more and then so it's currently starting burning into and that creates the land where the land subsides, the holes created by the fires after the next slide. After they created the gaps, then after the rainy season starts, these gaps are filled with water and because of the water reaches the underlying acid surface layer of the peat which then turn the land and water acid. So the fire goes out, the fire disappears, but after the fire disappears often the real problems start because you will end up with a landscape in very high acidity levels which makes, for example, plant regrowth and others more difficult and creates effectively the former tropical forest effectively into a, effectively baselands. And that is why we are now working together with the government towards an integrated five-manus of pros which includes actually three elements, increase the readiness so have the systems and the warnings in place and the capacity in villages so that communities can, if informed by cell phones and so can act upon, can act upon a fire warning and put catfires out before they spread into the peat. And then that is the readiness and that requires the response capacity because the capacity includes the systems so that we have through what's called incident command system which means that we can feel that there are people trained as incident commanders. We can have the ability to call in airplanes and to call in all kinds of support to make sure the fire doesn't spread and after then the fire is put out then we work towards recovery of the landscape through a process like rewetting and peat-rewetting, peat restoration, restoration of vegetation and so on. And at the same time ensuring that the risk levels within the peat landscapes are being reduced and by doing so ultimately avoiding future fire events like as in 2019, 2015 and as we hope now this year we already have been able to have some impact and we've been able to reduce fire risk and we hope to accelerate a trend in the future. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you, Johan. We will hold questions until the end when we open up the floor. So I now would like to turn to Daniel Modiasso who is principal scientist at CIFOR who will be explaining why peatlands are such unique and fragile ecosystems. His topic is titled Where have all the tropical peat forests gone? Daniel, over to you. Thank you, Malin. Well, the big question is again where they've gone and why peatlands or tropical peatland matter in the battle of climate change. So, peat swarm forests is a very unique ecosystem in the tropics because they serve a lot of ecosystem surfaces that you can expect including mainly storing huge amount of carbon in this ecosystem and they are kept and preserved there because the ecosystem is kept wet so when you have peatland and it's getting dry that's the beginning of the problem. So it's very important to have peatland always wet in order to keep the organic material which are potential to be emitted when it is dry to be there. So when the conversion is taking place deforestation is taking place degradation of tropical peat swarm forests is taking place they usually follow by developing or establishing drainage canal in order to have the converted peatland to be manageable. So draining is one thing in the tropical peatland landscape and usually in order to make the land more arable to remove the biomass people put fire and that can happen very fast. So those carbon stored in many years will be released in relatively quick period and if your peat is wet then you will end up with smoldering fire you have smoke, a lot of smoke and haze that will cause a lot of problem in terms of health and also feasibility in the air traffic etc. But if the peat is dry when the canal is established very likely one will end up with blazing fire like the picture in the bottom. So in order to look at how the tropical peatland can be very crucial and significant in combating climate change we try to look at the amount of carbon release back in 2015 we went out during that big fire during the month of September and October we did measure what happened and what is there in the haze. What we call fire emission factor was started to be quantified and we were impressed and amazed to see that every single kilogram of dry peatland it will release about one and a half kilogram of carbon dioxide.  And in this particular period in Central Kalimantan we measured during those two months of September, October 2015 every day around 11 million tons of carbon dioxide was emitted. So that's a large amount. Just to give you comparison or perspective that amount is larger than daily emission of the entire EU countries, 28 countries daily emission is about 8.9, almost 10 but that fire in Central Kalimantan was 11.3 million tons a day. So that's the scale of disaster when fire is taking place. So why then it matters in terms of combating against climate change. Again, we did measure the amount of carbon stored there. This is an example of deep peatland with a depth of around 5 to 6 and many places we also can find 16 meters depth of peat. The amount of carbon stored in every hectare is about 1500 tons. So that's about 5 times higher than pristine tropical forests in every hectare. So that's the potential of peatland if it is conserved to be able to mitigate climate change. A lot bigger, the potential is a lot bigger than tropical forests itself. Because as you can see in the graph the dark area is the amount of carbon underneath in the soil, in the peat which is about 80% compared to the amount of the carbon in the forest. So even if tropical peat-some forest is removed we still have a large amount, large portion of carbon underneath. So again, if it is kept there and wet tropical peatland can be a potential solution for climate change. If you look at this landscape it's a contrast between degraded peat-some forests in the foreground, it's very light green and it's very secondary, not necessarily pristine. It's been disturbed but quite dark in the back. So one good thing about combining mitigation and adaptation in this kind of situation because it can get burned very easily. You can see in the foreground is the canal and there's trading canal suddenly if it is blocked you can put the water table back so that the soil can be moist enough to help the vegetation to grow when it is introduced and also at the same time reduce the emission because oxidation is avoided. So blocking the canal is one thing and then reintroducing tropical peatland species is another one. So restoring peatland can consider that in terms of adapting with the changing climate and at the same time also avoiding fire and also reducing emission. So all these tropical forests are already disturbed and affected by human intervention. A lot has been converted and we are sure that this ecosystem, newly established ecosystem will keep emitting. Be it acacia, plantation, oil palm or crop lands, they are still emitting. So we try to look at this in order to quantify again the emission factor and this is very important for monitoring when you are talking about introducing for example a red project. So one need to have the so-called emission factor in the left-hand side you can see the emission factors for various land uses including the highest one here is acacia plantation followed by crop lands and oil palm. So somewhere around 70 ton per hectare emission that's happening in acacia plantation. On the right-hand side this is different presentation. This is a lifetime or life cycle of crops and trees. We use this 25 years. The amount of emission is quantified there as ecosystem. Again we need to monitor this in order to report what's going to happen if you implement project in a converted pit land or compare with pristine and conserved pit land. So we need to monitor this especially land use chains and emission factor with regard to disturbing and tropical forests. Thank you. Thank you very much Daniel. So indeed I now turn to Adam Gerand who is acting FAO representative in Indonesia. His topic is titled monitoring pit lands for climate impacts and benefits using ground soil. I've never wondered how you actually measure emissions stored in pit land. You'll want to tune in for that one. Adam. Thank you Emily and Daniel for that introduction. Hello colleagues here at C4 and online participants. My name is Adam Gerand from the UN food and agriculture organization. I'm going to talk about climate impacts and how we can monitor them better. We need to monitor them better. So I'm going to be talking about that with a particular emphasis on climate impacts. Next slide. So historically pit lands have mostly been avoided by people. They've either been ignored or at worst abused or degraded. So I'm going to talk about that with a particular emphasis. It's really pleasing that the Indonesian government has now got a policy of pit restoration. What they're calling three hours. This is rewetting, re-vegetation and revitalization that Daniel mentioned. Those things are really important. But we still have some challenges in pit lands. They're difficult to access, the conditions inside the pit lands it's hard to do monitoring inside pit lands and it also means that we've got poor management inside the pit lands. There's weak enforcement. These are difficult areas to operate in. So we understand a little bit about why we want to monitor pit lands for these rewetting and raising of the water tables. We want to re-vegetate those areas and we want to create alternative livelihoods for the people that are living there. So we need to think about what we need to measure and to monitor them. One of the most important things from a carbon point of view is the biomass. That is not only the biomass in the trees above the ground but as we've heard from Daniel there's a lot of carbon in the pit land soil and we've also heard from Johan that that can actually burn when the pit land gets dry enough. So we need to monitor the groundwater level. That's the depth or the distance below the surface of the pit where the water goes down when the canals are put in and the pit lands are drained. When that happens progressively there is this oxidation or the loss of pit lands particularly made worse when the pit lands are burnt and you can get subsidence from the pit lands that is effectively greenhouse gas going into the atmosphere. So we need to be measuring all of those things. The groundwater level, the subsidence the greenhouse gases and ultimately if it gets significant subsidence or loss of pit land if it's near the coast you can have inundation with water and that can actually lead to potential large loss of land. So this is a very important thing to be monitoring. We also want to be monitoring livelihood and economic information. I'm not going to talk about that today. I'm going to focus on the biophysical things for climate change. One of the most obvious we can do is vegetation cover changing land use, deforestation can be measured and monitored through satellites. Many people have seen pictures of that. We can also do fire hotspots. Fires show up very well in satellites and we can and there is an active program of measuring those things in Indonesia. In addition we can do much better at being able to do some other things with satellite data. Soil moisture data can actually be estimated by special satellites with radar data so that we can now get better estimates across the pit lands without actually having to go there. Next slide. So there are two basic ways and I want to talk a bit about the advantages and disadvantages of how to measure pit lands. The first of which is field data collection and the second one is remote sensing. Historically field data has been the primary way of collecting pit land data. That used to mean going out to the field and measuring it manually. You can see people walking around here in pit swamps in this small picture. It's not easy work. Increasingly we're putting automatic sensors into pit lands to measure things like ground border level, to measure greenhouse gases and to measure excitants. Those things are being done increasing with automated machines but most often it still has to have people going there in the field to do difficult pit land work, research work. This is hard, wet, dirty work. It's slow and expensive and in the end you only cover a very small area so it's got its limitations. That's where the remote sensing comes in because with satellites aircrafts, drones, you can cover large areas very fast. We're getting much better satellites with increased resolution. Even LiDAR lasers are being used to measure pit lands. We can get very detailed maps now and particularly they can give us consistent time series of maps that can show changes, really monitoring the pit in near real time. Increasingly this data is very cost effective because agencies are making it free. Of course the cost of the satellite is expensive but those satellites are being built for many purposes to monitor the world and the data is increasingly available free. Free data is not the only thing. You still need to access that data which is complicated. You need to process it with big computers and that requires skilled staff. But let me show you when you get all that data together some of the information you can put also on the web to make that more available to the public and to managers. This is an example of Indonesia's pit lands monitoring system called PRIMS, pit restoration information monitoring system and it's showing an area of Southern Kalamantan that has got huge areas of pit land in green. If we go through this, I'll also show you on the next slide you can see the extensive areas of canals that have been put in across those pit lands. All of those canals are causing pit degradation, greenhouse gases, drying of the pit and making them more susceptible to fires. With systems like this, people are now much more aware of how extensive those canals are and what a huge area of degraded pit lands we're dealing with. This helps the managers make better decisions and understand where to do the actions that they need to do to restore the pit lands. If we zoom in and have a look at one of those sites, I'm just showing you there, we'll zoom right in and have a look at what has been done in some of those pit lands. This map shows backfilling that is filling in of pit lands in the blue dots in a canal system there on the right side of the vertical line. Those areas have been filled to fill up the pit lands, to stop them draining, fill up the canal, stop the pit lands draining. In the background, the layer of pink and blue is showing some of the satellite data that is giving an indication of the changes in soil moisture between 2016 and 2018. You can see on the right hand side of that chart the areas where they've been filled, the areas are bluer. On the left hand side it is pink and red, so we're still getting negative drier pit lands. So we're seeing this as being a way to monitor pit lands, the restoration of pit lands using satellites. So the blue areas have positive change in soil moisture index, which is very promising. Last slide please. So in conclusion, pit lands have huge potential. They have impacts on climate change, but they also have promise for restoring and absorbing more carbon. There are two basic methods for pit land measurement, field measurements and remote sensing. I've indicated or hinted at some of the rapid improvements in pit land monitoring and how we're able to get better monitoring data from automated groundwater levels, new satellites, high resolution and even products like soil moisture. All of this is leading us to faster, cheaper large area pit land monitoring. This is very positive. But I still want to reinforce that we've got many challenges remaining to be resolved. Pit lands are still mostly undervalued, underresourced and poorly managed. We need to build the research and the capacity development to manage those pit lands better. But I want to end on a positive note. I think there's increasing recognition of climate change links, the urgency, political will. There's increasingly here in Indonesia, particularly research being done on pit lands. The International Tropical Pit Land Centre is being set up here in C4 in collaboration with the government with strong ministerial support. We're getting globally collaboration through the Global Pit Lands Initiative between different countries. So hopefully we will learn the lessons of how to manage our pit lands. I think for future, for pit lands, the future is promising. Thank you. Thank you, Adam. Thank you very much. All right. So let me now turn to Abdul Wahid Sitomarang, who is Senior Advisor for Natural Resources Governance at UNDP Indonesia. He's going to tell us about innovative financing for pit lands restoration and protection. Thank you, Emeline and colleagues and online participants. As said by the previous speakers, it is very important to manage the pit land and also to undertake pit restorations. Well, in order to realize that it requires a sufficient budget, budget is very important to undertake those objectives. As you may know, the government already set our target to restore the degraded pit land up to 2020 is about 2.4 million hectares. So this is the priority and if it is restored, it will also create significant impact to other pit land areas. So this is the most priority. So I just want to give you a sense, in order to restore 2.4 million hectares, there is a budget exercise done by the pit land restoration agency. It requires about 10 trillion rupees or it is similar or it is equivalent to $779 million. So it is quite expensive and that budget alone will not be sufficient to cover this budget. Therefore we need to explore other financing mechanisms to meet the targets. There are several financing mechanisms that we can explore in addition to state budget. So I just want to highlight a few of them and then we can explore further through question and answer. So the first one is there is a potential to mobilize resources from Islamic financing community. The framework is already set up under the Ministry of Finance, they call it Green Sukuk. Under the Green Sukuk it is very possible to use the money to do the pit restoration and pit conservation. So this is one source that the government can explore. The second option is through ecological fiscal transfer. If you are familiar with environmental fiscal transfer instruments at least there are two that we are very familiar with. The first one is general budget allocation. The second one is specific budget allocation. For specific budget allocation it is kind of this incentive mechanism. The poorer you are, the more you will get transfer from the central government. But there is also another fiscal transfer and this is very innovative that the government of Indonesia has they call it investment fund. In this, if the province government has a good initiative to protect the pit land or do innovative things to restore the pit land then they can have the investment fund.  The issue is it is not yet included in the criteria to get the investment fund now. So it is very important to encourage the central government to also include pit land restoration and pit land conservation. One of the indicators for the province to get the investment fund. Of course, private responsibility is very important and the Ministry of Environmental Policy can tell more how private responsibility is also a game changer to do this. Payment for environmental services and polluter pay mechanisms can also contribute significantly to mobilize resources to restore the pit land. In the conclusion I just want to highlight that resources are very important and that budget alone cannot cover all to do it and therefore we need to explore other mechanisms to meet the targets. That's all. Thank you, Chuck. Finally, our last speaker of the day is Mr. Jati Wichaksono Adi Chief of Public Relations Bureau at the Ministry of Environment and Forestry in Indonesia. Mr. Jati will offer some final closing remarks including a video on the remarkable biodiversity of Indonesia. Please, Mr. Jati. Hello, good afternoon. Prof. Daniel, Mr. Johan, Mr. Wichak and Emeline and Adam. Hi. On behalf of Ministry of Forestry and Environment and Forestry, hello. Indonesian has committed a commitment in Indonesia. I can say to the Indonesian has ratified under the law number 16 at 2016 to ensure our commitment for sustainable forest and pit management and to reduce carbon emission under IDD Plus scheme. And Indonesia has put in place IDD Plus infrastructure consists of IDD National Strategy, FRAIL, NFMH and SIF Guard Information System Plus Monitoring, Reporting and Verification System. And today we are on the finalised step to the making result of the base payment reality. And Indonesia has established and well-run the National Strategy System on Climate Change called an SCC to gather information on all IDD Plus related activities on climate change, mitigation and adaptation. The data is represented to ensure transparency and easy to understand by multi-stakeholder. And in progress, annual emission reduction from forest and pit during the period of 2002-2060 is 709 100 Giga CO2 equivalent if the emission from the pit fire is taken out the average rate would be 466 035 Giga Giga Tone Giga Tone CO2 equivalent which contributes from the composition of annual rate of 305, 304, 377 Giga Tone CO2 equivalent. The significant improvement made a fire mitigation and response compared to 2060 emission reduction from pit fire has significant drop from to 712,000 Giga Tone to 2015 to 90,000 Giga Tone CO2 equivalent. And in 2017 pit fire emission is on average 12,000 Giga Tone CO2 equivalent. The government has issued ministerial decree to protect and manage pit ecosystem in 2040 with further revise in 2060 maybe empathy emphasized on the pit function carbon storage and to conserve biodiversity. And new paradigm social forestry a flagship program in ensure to the community active partnership on sustainable forest management. The social forestry is to make sure to the forest management unit or KAPEHA in our future FMU or forest management unit now as KAPEHA, Satuan Pengolaan Hutan which have three type for KAPEP forest production for KAPEHAL protection forest and KAPEHAK for conservation forest. And public private partnership through the various means one of them is engaging private sector as restoration ecosystem partners and media as co-partner in ensuring public engagement and taken into consideration on all ministry of environment and forestry program. I think enough. Thank you. Emily? Thank you. I understand you have a video the ministry has made that you would like to be shown so I will ask our colleagues to show the video now. Indonesia is one of the largest archipelagic countries in the world with more than 17,000 islands that spread over an area of more than 2 million kilometers squares Indonesia is host to several unique ecosystems containing a large number of diverse species at least 10% of the world's flowering species which counts to over 25,000 species flourish in Indonesia there are also 12% of the world's mammals 16% of reptiles 17% of birds 6% of amphibians and over 45% of fishes all of which are parts of the nation slash biodiversity in order to preserve its biodiversity which also contributes hugely to the world Indonesia has taken significant steps in accordance to the national and global target on biodiversity framework the government has allocated more than 500 units of protected areas spread throughout the country with the total coverage area of 22 million hectares terrestrial and 20 million marine protected area because of its uniqueness and universal values these areas are recognized as World Heritage Sites 16 Biosphere Reserves 7 Ramsor Sites and 7 ASEAN Heritage Sites many studies and researches has also been conducted to identify plants and animals to assess their potential uses for medicine, food energy and bio control for chemical hazard some community driven activities such as ecotourism has also contributed to the effort to preserve Indonesia's biodiversity which also encouraged cooperation among local stakeholders the results are heartening by 2019 Indonesia has been able to increase the population of endemic and priority species communities have also enjoyed benefits from this improved environment through ecotourism environmental services and other significant condition which contribute to their quality of life as a whole there is little doubt that Indonesia's vast biodiversity plays a hugely significant role in reducing the impacts of climate change by preserving its biodiversity and its ecosystems Indonesia can help support the entire planet's sustainability and ensure a better future for all humankind thank you very much okay with this I'd like to thank you all for your presentations and also thank everyone for their kind attention we will now open the floor to questions starting with those in the audience in the C4 offices for those joining us online I'll be asking you in a few minutes to type your questions in the chat box and I'll pick up the questions from there and if you could please indicate who you're addressing the question to that would be useful and on that note I also wanted to indicate that we have another expert in the audience Yves Le Monnier who is C4 senior scientist specializing ecology and mapping so if you have questions in particular on the mapping related to the fire pitlands or red plants in general you can also send your question to him okay over to those in C4 to pick up a couple of questions maybe we'll take two questions from the audience please well I have a question for you when you list down the potential financial scheme what are the most accessible and already been implemented so far with regard to climate change from the list you had including Sukuk and other things well thank you for Daniel for your questions and I will also answer questions from Jan Peters the question is are there any thoughts about using carbon credit schemes or financing so from Daniel among the financing mechanisms private responsibility is has been implemented because there is a request from the government from the Ministry of Environment for private sector to also undertake the business research in their constitutional area so private responsibility concrete question is which one is accessible and who is using that well well if I may answer Islamic financing is the most accessible Islamic financing is the most accessible because the framework is already there and the government is issuing Sukuk every year well it is up to Ministry whether they want to use Sukuk or not to finance the business research so there is nobody using it so far so for pit restorations it's not yet for pit restorations it's not yet but for conservation for national park they already access that who is using it Ministry of Environment Ministry already use the Sukuk I was thinking of private sector or something like that no this is the sovereign Sukuk it is not private Sukuk it is also possible for private sector to issue Sukuk to finance their activity to restore the pit areas so it is possible okay thank you very much I see that questions are already piling up in the question box thank you so much I'm taking note of all of them just before we get to them I'll now pick a question from the audience great thanks so much for the fantastic webinar I'm Amy Dushala scientist here at C4 and I just have a question actually for the two people sitting in the room here who are focusing a little bit more on the research and monitoring side and I'm just wondering given a bit of the crisis state of peatland conservation, the fires that are happening now if you had an unlimited amount of funds where would you target those funds in terms of critical peatland research and critical monitoring research if we follow the pattern that BRG for example is using the triple R I think the third R would be the most immediate and impactful way to do that's the revitalization of the local livelihood including alternative of livelihood that would be straightforward and measurable in terms of avoiding further deforestation and degradation on draining peatland and also this will have a long-term impact if one can really demonstrate the result of the intervention from thanks for the question Amy from my side I think in terms of the topics I support Daniel's view on the socio-economic side that's very much needed we do need to provide an alternative livelihood for the people living and working around the peatlands those are the people that are using fire for their own subsistence livelihoods in many cases and we need to help them change their practices by giving them an alternative but I think we need to be doing more than just one thing we need to be doing multiple things so at the same time as doing those programs if we had unlimited funds the activities like rewetting the active work that's being done on that is really important and we should be doing that at the same time as helping people move away from those practices the damaging practices blocking the canals and filling them up and getting water into those peatlands is one of the most important things we can do to stop the fires in terms of places to where to do it it's clear to me that Indonesia is the hotspot globally it's also the place where there is most political will most interest and focus so it's clearly a good place to start we also should be looking at other countries before they make these same kind of past practices and open up their peatlands to realize how difficult it is and we've been doing that through the global peatlands initiative by bringing other countries here so sharing the lessons learned and experiences and Indonesia and the Minister of Environment and Forest herself is very keen on that sharing that information with other countries to avoid bad practices occurring on other peatlands elsewhere thanks thank you on the note we have a question from Lok Sapkota which would be well answered by Johan and Mr Jati the question is in light of climate change is there any temporal change in terms of seasonal change in peatland fire are there any spatial patterns of peatland fire in relation to management social forestry was mentioned as an approach and this person is interested so if there has been a difference in dealing with peatfire so Johan would you like to answer that question yeah of course I can thank you for your question and yeah I think we have to underline that even in Southeast Asia it is of course mainly Indonesia problem but recently saw substantial peatland fires in southern Thailand and this shows as well the sensitivity and indeed by clearing peat from forest you create changes in the microclimates which will lead to more to more to more to drier conditions to drier conditions and thus nearly a dry out of the topsoil and thus given that the topsoil consist mainly of organic forest materials thus higher chances in more chance of fires so in nature if you look at natural circumstances you don't see now there are expectations but you don't hardly see fires in intact tropical in intact tropical primary peat forest so as soon as you remove the forest cover you initiate the process of also beside global climate change also of local microclimate changes which will indeed lead to more to more chances in forest and that will also follow a special distribution of fires Thank you Mr. Jati since you mentioned social forestry in your presentation would you like to add something sorry you are on mute On social forestry until now ministry environment and forestry has issued certificate for 3 million hectares for surrounding people from forest in Indonesia community in on surrounding the forest and the team in ministry of forestry has prepared to the social forestry make a more until 5 million 5 million in end of 2019 yeah yeah and all community in surrounding forest will be responsible for the forest fire inside the community fire brigade or self support to the forest fire combating yeah yes and Manggala Agni is under control for the climate change should be stand by in the side by side for the control with health sport monitoring of vulnerable area on seven province in Indonesia yeah yeah thank you very much mr jetty okay another question we received from our colleagues of the recocked center for forest and forest sorry they are interested in learning about the integrated management of between landscapes and and you know recognizing that there is competition competing demands for water they like to learn more about how to develop and implement between landscape management biodiversity and livelihood development so if any of the panelists have experiences of how to bring together water forestry irrigation fishery water transportation and to design landscape management plans so who could take this this question Johan go ahead okay thanks the governance of peak land particularly the water is essential and if you look at traditional practices also here in Indonesia like for example the handle Central Kalimantan example of how already communities have dealt with sustainable management of peak lands and I think in that perspective it's now that the Indonesia government is moving towards peak hydro systems and that is actually an important step towards more landscape based management of peak lands however that will as well more active engagement by land uses like you see for example in these handles where actually land uses associate themselves and collaborate on land use and also on maintenance of water infrastructure like you say now has to happen at a larger scale at KG levels and that's why we're currently working with Indonesia Coordinated Ministry of Economic Affairs and with the Ministry of Environment and Forestry to look at models to apply in Indonesia and as part of that we have facilitated a study trip to the Netherlands for the Ministry of Environment and Forestry to look there at so called water boards or water scuffs which are based around similar principles and we're now looking at in a sense applying that at a larger scale the cost of so because that will require substantial build of human capital in terms of capacity or deal with this because we have to admit that the like in the current situation where peak lands are used and the argument in peak lands parts of forest parts of forest lands, parts of the forest estate and so on but then we have to use the ecological most relevant boundaries which are defined by hydrology so we need to build covenants systems around these and that's currently we are working on as human environment and cost cooperation with the Indonesian Coordinated Ministry of Environment and Forestry partners with partners like the FLU and the PC4 and like Wageningen First University Research Centre and with Kimita thank you Thank you Johan so we also have an interesting question on financing from Jan Peters and actually he could buy at Belief Recoft as well they are wondering whether there are any sorts that using carbon credit schemes for financing peak land re-wetting you want to take that one Thank you Emily and thank you for the questions whether it is possible using carbon credit schemes I will put in the carbon credit schemes under payment for environmental services as an umbrella of these mechanisms yes it is yes it is possible yes it is possible and if we look at the green climate fund it is very possible for country to access these mechanisms for carbon credit schemes and this is for the multilateral mechanism for the voluntary and bilateral mechanisms if we look at Indonesia case with Norway or any other countries Finland is also included as one of the activities that are eligible to get carbon credit schemes so yes it is very possible is there any question I think if somebody wants to add something we have other questions coming up so another question that we received is for Daniel and Adam you mentioned ecological restoration by re-wetting in natural succession but we are wondering whether there are also plans to implement alternative plantations on re-wetted sites in Pali culture thank you for the question if I understand it correctly it was about whether polluter culture has been tested or trialled for those who don't know what polluter culture is it's the practice of growing or managing the land in a wet condition so that you keep the soil moisture close or near to the surface like in natural conditions but you're growing crops or grasses or trees that actually are adapted to those conditions so many native species but you're still using them for certain purposes so certainly polluter culture is a very attractive method for peatlands because you can actually use the peatlands but you're keeping them in a wet condition so they don't degrade however it's not a practice that is well understood yet we've got a list of polluter culture species and there have been some small scale research trials but it hasn't been done on very big areas yet so certainly we need to scale that up there is technology saying it's possible but how to do it over large areas how to make it economically viable is also a big challenge so definitely research needs to be done on that FAO and others the Ministry of Environment and Forestry Research Group here in Fordia it's called in Indonesia has done trials on that they do have established demonstration plots what we need to do is to get some funding and some finance to really scale that up test it across large areas and to get some of these products that are used from those polluter culture into an economic market chain so that people can make a genuine livelihood business out of it and also sustainably manage it test it so that it's sustainable so those things are promising but they're not demonstrated at a large scale yet and we need to actually put those in place particularly on the areas of peatlands that have been moderately degraded but can be restored with this active active revegetation but there are already people living there so I encourage that thanks for the question Anil would you like to add something yeah well this polluter culture practice can be combined with the in the Indonesian context the R3 one which is the revitalization of the local community and I think one should be mindful that the preference is always with the local people so we have to be careful in introducing polluter culture species if it is not well received we might end up with problems so it would be nice to after being tested scientifically one need to explore the response from the local community how they perceive about these species and certainly market is very important they usually have practice a lot of local species like rubber in the peatland and they know the market they know the network and they have practiced that for a long time and this is one thing that need to be considered also thank you thank you very much one more question from Kali from County Climate Governance Initiative the question is what kind of international governance or scheme is needed to promote national global and regional efforts in restoring peatlands in particular to balance different goals including climate change, biodiversity and livelihoods what kind of capacity building is needed at different levels like a big picture question but I think quite a relevant one as well anybody wants to take it on Daniel Daniel first Daniel certainly the Paris Agreement is one thing and it's still quite hot in term of the political will and in the light of the nationally determined contribution peatland certainly can be part of this exercise as I mentioned earlier the carbon asset is certainly very significant especially in Indonesia we know effort has been made how to include this in the NDCs in the early submission of the FRL peatland has been included but peatfire is not there so if we connect between this improvement of FRL and NDC and BUR and other discovering processes and reporting mechanism I think Paris Agreement will be a prominent destination to get the activities to get the attention of the activities on the ground so that's one thing but if it is related to other services that peatland can provide including biodiversity one can also use other mechanism within the biodiversity convention as well so multiple approach can be exercise in term of global governance thank you you wanted to add something yes one option is that we are starting to work on that now is to look at the international trading mechanisms like for example the ECOA, the airline industry Corsia scheme and to start including and to start working on making emission reductions from peatlands and actually marketable and the corollary guys of course better monitoring system and effort systems there are of course already VCS, voluntary carbon scheme projects active in Indonesia like Rimbau-Makmurtama, Rimbau-Makmurtja who successfully have been trading emission reductions to international buyers and so there is certainly scope and certainly scope for more but I think as well as international organizations active in peatlands I think like C4, FAO, UNIFI UNDP and particularly I think we should work we are working in a sense of putting the building box in place to indeed make that happen and through international research based payment schemes and I think particularly Indonesia is of course one case but I think I would like to underline this as well that of course there are large peatlands in South America in the Amazon basin as well in the Congo area which of course are facing similar challenges if you look at the recent Brazil forest fires I think you can underline that certainly not only Indonesian problem and that means as well that there is a need for collaboration to go beyond the Paris agreement and look at ways that we to better link in peatlands in the international in the international carbon offset markets bringing in the additional resources to accelerate efforts by government yes yes yes I want to add information on sustainable peat management in Indonesia yeah the first under Director General pollution control we have been successfully monitoring and mapping the peat areas and peat dome under concession holders area this will help us monitoring peat management and force private sector also responsible and second the monitor room for new palm oil plantation and third one law enforcement until now the Director General of law enforcement 110 companies has been sent warning by Ministry of Environment and Forestry and 19 companies are being suspended on their confession 14 companies are being investigated and one on process on the court yeah I hope the I hope the law enforcement make effective very effective for forest fire control in Indonesia thank you thank you for this complimentary information Mr Jetty we close to having to wrap up but on the Sunday is one more question from the audience at SIPA offices thank you for the chance to ask a question my name is Ian a researcher in here I actually want to ask in everyone's mind in here which actor actually have the most potential to make the effort of peatland restoration become sustainable in the long term like which actor actually have the most potential to make the effort of peatland restoration become sustainable in the long term that's my question yeah thank you very much I think that's a great question and what I'll do is that I'll give everyone each of the speaker a chance to answer and share any final thoughts before we close so starting with you Daniel the question is about who is the most influential, influential actors I don't know maybe everybody can play role in different ways we cannot single out to one particular actor in handling this huge problem extensive in terms of area as well as unique situation in places we cannot single out to one particular actor depends on what is driving the deforestation degradation and also draining and use of fire so if those are well identified I think those are the actors or stakeholders that one needs to work with very closely that's why I keep saying about R3 the revitalization if that is the case then how can you find out the alternative for these actors to have alternative for their livelihood if it is local community and which local community it's area they have different kind of interests and objective sorry I cannot say one particular one should be well studied thank you for the question from my side I would say that like Daniel says there are many actors that have many roles but I think they have different roles clearly the government in many countries has a huge role to play in terms of management decisions governments put in place legal frameworks that allow what happens in land or give licenses or in the case of Indonesia put a moratorium and then take them away and we've heard just then strong action being taken by the Ministry of Environment and Forestry in Indonesia on enforcement to make sure that those policies and practices are pursued by companies so that's really clear leadership and it's pleasing to hear so the government has a clear role but I also I think we've got other actors and players it's good you put it that way we've got companies who have leasehold lands or licenses to operate in certain areas different countries have different arrangements for that they need to be given guidelines on how to manage peatlands many times their perspective is making profit they don't necessarily know that what they're doing is unsustainable a lot of this peatlands management knowledge is only relatively recent and I'm talking the last few decades so we need to inform them they need to follow the rules but we also need to inform them on how to run their businesses to produce their products hopefully change their products to something that could be more sustainable on those lands consumers who are buying those products need to be educated they need to learn where their products and where of the impact that might have certainly that's happened with a number of products and I think there's a long way to go on that finally I'd say that there's a really strong role for local people as Daniel has mentioned a couple of times the original people who lived on a lot of these lands, the indigenous peoples they knew how to manage these lands sustainably and many of them are still there in the margins of that they're often in between their traditional livelihoods and the new market-based economy getting them an opportunity to be able to go back and live a more traditional life if they want to or at least learn how to do some of those activities in a more sustainable way and make a livelihood out of it is a really important thing that we could have been encouraged so there's a lot of actors with different roles putting them all together and informing them of these things is a huge challenge but it's something we need to do thanks thank you let's go over to your truck in your hand okay now I think to the actors I think has already been explained by the previous species all actors have to play a role but particularly as coming from the international community I think our role as well and I think in the recently the way we have facilitated for example the cooperation, South-South cooperation between countries to the Brassifil agreement I think it's an example how we can as the international community bring the PTC to the table and then an underlying as well that PIC is a global issue it's not only in the tropics but it's also an issue of temperate countries and it's not only in the tropical commodity supply chain but also in products like from temperate regions like for example also the European dairy products are produced on PIC plants which are emitting greenhouse gas emissions as we speak so from this perspective I think we have all to play a role and I think that our international community is actually to articulate and make both member states but also the wider communities aware of the importance of this tropical PIC plant to avoid a global climate disaster and while at the same time share and help to share and facilitate solutions to address these issues well you know for me you know there are two actors in addition to two actors have been explained by the previous speakers number one is the international community in terms of mobilizing resources to support the PIC restoration and PIC conservation implement done by country that have PIC land area so it is also important for international community to support in terms of the financing because the country is not sufficient to do that number two is the journalist as a journalist it is very important to write an article to educate the public how important PIC land not only for environment for ecosystem but also for local people by writing a good article will also contribute for people to protect and conserve and love the PIC land thank you and finally Mr. Jetty would you like to share a couple of words just very briefly before we wrap up yeah talking about the responsible for controlling the PIC ecosystem yeah of course of a ministry of environment and forestry has a function as regulator facilitator and controlling the implementation of course we cannot work it alone therefore we closely collaborated with other countries ministry other ministries sorry BRG international organization private sectors and active participant from communities we also strength operation with other countries such as Kono, Norway Peru Brazil Germany and many others thank you thank you very much and on that note thank you again for joining us today please don't hesitate to reach out to us if you have any follow up thoughts or questions I see that some colleagues would be interested in receiving the presentations you can reach the organizers by contacting the contact details were indicated in the advert for this webinar but we can also reach us on social media at c4 and at unred and because we'd really like to hear from you this is a discussion but for now this is goodbye so thank you all and have a nice day


Hello, everybody. This is Anne Jekyll from New Mexico Epscore. It's just noon on the dot, so I'm going to give folks a minute to join as our attendee count is going up. So stay tuned for about 30 seconds and we will start our webinar. You shouldn't be clacking. No, you're not. Okay. Well, we're one minute past the hour, so we'll go ahead and get started and others can join us as we go along. Again, my name is Anne Jekyll. I'm the Associate Director of New Mexico Epscore. And I'd like to welcome you to our second New Mexico Smart Grid Center webinar. Today we'll be talking about network DC microgrids with Gary Opadol from Ameri Technologies, and I will introduce him in a second, but I wanted to remind you the purpose of these webinars, which is to present research and promote collaboration across our project. And in addition, we'll provide a venue for outside presenters working on subjects related to microgrids and other topics of interest to Mexico Smart Grid Center team members to present. So that's what we'll hear about today. We will host these webinars the fourth Friday of every month at noon. So please mark your calendars. And if you have ideas of presenters you would like to hear from or would like to present yourself, please contact me. You can find my information on our website nmepscore.org pretty readily. I've deployed a poll here that is asking how you would like to hear about these webinars. We're fine tuning our process to get the word out to you all and to get you to join. So please take a minute to fill out this poll you look somewhere on your screen zoom pops it up and I'll end it in a second. And one item of webinar housekeeping. We have a question and answer box. And this is where you can communicate with us and ask questions of Gary as he's presenting and we will moderate a Q&A so please contact us that way. One reminder is the our next webinar which will be on November 22 at noon and we will have the New Mexico National Laboratories presenting so Arthur Byron's from Los Alamos National Laboratory will be presenting on protection of inverter interface microgrids and from Sandia National Laboratories will be presenting on a recently completed project on distribution voltage regulation provided by multiple distributed energy resource control strategies both topics that are very relevant to our project research areas. So please join us and mark your calendar now for that. So with that I would like to introduce Gary Opadol from Ameri Technologies. Gary has 30 years of entrepreneurial leadership and technical management experience and has started many successful companies. Also serving as the director of economic development at the city of Albuquerque. He speaks the language of many in our project as he's an electrical engineer by degree, and he currently holds a position of vice president of emerging technologies at Ameri, or a subsidiary called Ameri Technologies. So Ameri for those of you that don't know is the company that owns New Mexico Gas Company, but it is primarily an electric utility and Ameri Technologies is pursuing multiple demonstrations of networked DC microgrids. The first project is at Kirtland Air Force Base and it's connected to all of the testing infrastructure at Sandia National Laboratories, and it is absolutely tremendous what he and Ameri Technologies have been able to do in a very short period of time. Gary and I have had some conversations about ways that our researchers can collaborate with him to promote New Mexico as the place to pursue microgrid research. So with that I will cede control of the interface to Gary and turn it over to him and his presentation. I'm going to assume that you can hear me and welcome. And as Ann said, it is my desire that New Mexico become the center of the universe with respect to advanced microgrids or distributed energy systems, which we would prefer, but most people understand what microgrids are. I am now employed by utility and so I will make sure that we do our safety briefing first. Usually, if you are out at the site and I do encourage everyone to come out and see what we've done there. There's nothing like a tour I'm going to try to describe something that is very difficult to understand unless you're actually sitting in it and you can watch energy being moved around from place to place. But in this in that safety briefing, I would tell you as we pull panels and look in things don't point at things with your fingers and then and follow the instructions of your tour guide and and to be safe around electricity and energy. For this purpose, I'll just say, I hope that no one is driving and will be distracted or operating any heavy equipment.  It's the desk. So I show this is my kind of my street credit slide but I show it only because I want to tell you that my dad brought me here to Albuquerque when he was the head of the Defense Nuclear Agency. And that's two underground nuclear shots for the United States up at the mercury test site. And I really believed that we would all be doing the George Jetson thing flying around in our flying cars and having robots 20 hour week work weeks, and that we would have abundant nuclear power. That's what I grew up in that was the paradigm. And, but he would say that the reason why that didn't happen was because we did not standardize properly. And so you'll, you'll see standardization and getting a building block approach, and then fractalizing is a huge part of of what we do. The other things to note on here is other than I'm genetically unemployable with this large list is that I grew up at Intel. After Air Force and electrical engineering degree and so that forms my model toward a meshed network and a network of network and nodes type of approach. So, and I've had some other experiences I did start up a medical company just because my incident that happened with my mother that is thriving here in New Mexico. And then the city of Albuquerque is interesting in that that's how I actually met the folks from a mirror as they were buying the new Mexico gas company. And it taught me a lot about how to get things done in large bureaucracies and of course the regulatory risks are the largest risks we have in trying to implement micro grids. I'll move forward just to let you know that America, just a little bit of a background. They're a $30 billion and asset company utility hold co and six countries so Canada, the United States and four Caribbean countries. And this is when you get to the why of why we were formed to start this business. You can see that on the East Coast here. So America is a, like I said a $30 billion utility hold co America technologies is a an LLC with one member America, but it is a skunk works it is meant to be separate from America so that we can move quickly and and really look at disruptions in the utility space, but you can see that along the East Coast is most of their holdings and in the Caribbean islands. So they're very interested in things that weren't going to blow down. They're also very interested in safety and and and trying to rebuild things easily and safely and so that's a large part of the impetus of forming mirror technologies was to think about how could we build things that would be safe to either direct Barry or to even lay on the ground and and and how could we move things forward given the trends in the utility world and that was our three year charter. When we were formed a year and a half ago. They did not expect the amount of progress we've made and they since we had an initial tranche of money. A couple of weeks ago they've since put in more money because of our success. But let's get to the problem. Renewable penetration is not progressing at the scalar pace necessary, even for our renewable portfolio standards that that we in New Mexico witnessed our governor signed earlier this year. In addition to that, we have a paradigm where resilience and readiness for our military. And any critical site is really this the current strategy is diesel generators. And we know that that's not going to be the right approach long term and if we could figure out how to come to a point where you're not making a choice between resilience and renewables but actually you see them as the same thing. So that would be the goal. Additionally, the technology is piecemeal we just came back from solar power international a couple weeks ago, you know 19,000 people talking about renewables and micro grids and all kinds of different things. But you have the 5000 isle which is solar and the 4000 which is wind and 3000 which is controls. There's no systems approach we saw that and then the business model is fragmented. We decided to address and our approach was to take a blank sheet of paper and some folks who had energy expertise some folks who had utility experience, partner with our good buddies at the Sandia National Labs. This is probably my seventh credit collaborative research and develop an agreement. Our friends at UNM and even an MSU. Now that Olga is there and Dr. Dan a verse of us so we've known for years and, and then how do we get some motivated resources to take advantage of the trends in cost and approach, right and that was our approach. When you start with a key with a blank sheet of paper you come up with a lot of good key attributes. And I'm not going to go through all of these today. I'll just stress a few but, you know, if you've got a super safe system just for instance just to pick one out workforce development. You can, it is our intent that you do a six week training course at a local community college at Santa Fe Community College or a CNM. And you would be an energy tech. That's a lot different than sending to, you know, two year plus experience folks in a quarter million dollar truck to the top of a of a power pole. And so we think that that will help in especially in rural areas in New Mexico and provide on ramps to low and no skilled folks who can to learn how to maintain. systems but again I'll just I'll just hit on a few of these just the point is with a blank sheet of paper you can you can really get through and create something from scratch which which bends a lot of minds and and so mindset is whenever you're talking about something really truly new and disruptive. It's really about the psychology and less about the technology the technology is actually important and it's an ante to get into the game. The psychology is more important and I'll talk a little bit about that as we go forward. What we call a micro grid, a distributed energy system is different than many micro grids you've seen, not to say that those micro grids aren't important they very much are, and we are standing on the shoulders of a lot of micro grid expertise, and the micro grid has been made. However, ours is a bit different, and I would just want to start out by emphasizing that that this is DC versus AC for its distribution it's AC at both ends both at the home or building level and at the power grid level, but the distribution within the micro grid is DC, it's decentralized control versus centralized control. And as a matter of fact it's it's it's actually distributed control, not all it has the capability of being totally decentralized but it's distributed. It's modular and standardized versus custom. The old joke of, you've seen one micro grid you've seen one micro grid. We want to have standards standard pieces of equipment that you just order. This is how many nano grid boxes you get. That's front of the meter versus behind the meter which allows the utilities to play. That's a big part of what we do is we were looking at current infrastructure and the problem with behind the meter is that there's no control of those resources and you get problems that are seen in Hawaii and California with duck curve and net metering issues which will eventually go away it's not sustainable. And how do we then control those things at each building and and you'll see from our schematics that this is front of the meter versus behind the meter. It's network versus non networked, you know, in a in a tabletop exercise in a community or a base before an event. If you pick the wrong building and put a diesel generator next to it. Well then all the other buildings are out of luck and we believe that network to know a note mesh network of nodes is the best way to go. New distributed energy resources are easy to apply versus hard, and we utilize the existing infrastructure. So we all know that the disruption is coming decarbonization digitalization and descent decentralization. And one of the things I've learned over my career is to look out over the horizon and find the thermals and ride the thermals versus flapping so hard these things are going to happen it's like, you know, the digital camera was invented in Kodak. And they came to management and management said it but it doesn't have film. Well, you can you can fight trends that are happening, or you can join in. As a matter of fact looked ahead 20 years and then work backwards that's what we're choosing to do here. We want to create a platform this will be something that many many will spawn many many more businesses, we are trying to be like the, like the Cisco of the internet we're going to be the the basic platform the basic building block. We call it block block energy of the new bidirectional energy network and and so we want we that's what we expect to be is a platform. This is a line diagram the line diagram is just meant to be instructional of our clean affordable safe and always on product here. But if you look at each house take or building take number one there. What we do is we put we make it just like your cell phone. It has its own generation it has its own storage, and it has its own power electronics, each one. And if you have that and if you have the building running off of the battery through an inverter split phase AC they get exactly what they get out of their meter now. Then, that says a lot of things about how you can design the loop or if you think of it like the bus here that delivers energy to it it doesn't have to be on all the time. You can design us really good safety factors and we've got intellectual property around our safety. This is a relatively slow system. In that battery asks to be first to be charged and you have a nice slow ramp up, you charge the battery nice slow ramp down and our intellectual property around our fault detection and protection is not involved over current. It says that anytime you've got any kind of ramp that is outside of what's expected, you turn the whole system off and from an engineering standpoint you can think of the system as normally off versus normally on. That means that you can really hit the safety part really well. Additionally, this is a this is an energy system not a power system now we deal with energy and power at the storage and at each nano grid box at each home. However, the distribution system is an energy system. It's an average so you can design for the average. So your local utility is somewhere between 15 and 20% of the capacity is only used. So a couple days per year, our fellow member of EPSCORE John Hawkins likes to say we designed for Christmas and Easter, but we run the church on a normal Sunday and in this situation you don't have to. You're designing for the average and not the peak. Additionally, what you see down there to the lower left is each micro grid has its own additional energy park we call it block energy park which has additional storage additional ground based solar or wind a natural gas generator and it is tied to the bulk power grid as a matter of fact our favorite situation is to be part of a network which includes the bulk power network. If you look at the individual building just for a second the way this happened was we started looking at buildings. And saying, you know, what could we do to to to have the paradigm of being in front of the meter and so we just put a box outside just like about the size of your air conditioning coil three by three by three that has sufficient storage power electronics. And in each box is the control system the sort of the power electronics and the storage to serve that load. As a matter of fact the control system learns the load over time through machine learning and we'll get back to that in a little bit. Then you run the DC solar into that DC box. And then the only thing that comes out to the house through the meter is split phase AC so that the, the folks in the house are getting exactly what they're used to. This is what it would typically look like in a neighborhood setting with solar on the roof and a nana grid box. And this is the, this is the diagram I want to really focus on though, and the rest is just examples of this. If you, again, I told you I come from Intel, I come from a place where we were trying to sell PCs in the early days. Well, what really made the PC something important with storage the analogy is actually striking. What really made it important, as we went through storage from, you know, first it was cassette tape and floppy drives then hard drives. It was seen as clunky and expensive than non reliable, just like the perception is for storage now with energy but that's not the case because there's a lot of electric vehicles and the tremendous pole. There are tens of giga factories for storage going on around the world and it will be the part of any new energy system. And so we will see in the next just very few years that we won't we won't think about storage anymore it will just be part of the design. I know I'm talking in the future here. But that's, that's where it's going and so that's where my heads at. But then the, but what really made the PC important was networking it. Right. So if you look at this, at this diagram of the circle on the left is each individual home you think of that as a PC. The PC is great on its own, but it's much more powerful if it is part of a local area network and that's what each micro grid would be the micro grid in this case is about, oh half a megawatt to a megawatt it's about 50 to 100 homes or mixed use buildings. And, and then at the next circle over would be the, the energy park where we have some additional generation storage ground based solar and natural gas generators. So the energy in this analogy would be your local server. So that makes it even more powerful where you can store things that are used by all the users right, and then the cloud is the utility grid in this analogy and all these things are even more effective when they have access to the cloud and all the other computers. Well, if you work this backwards now. If you lose the cloud, or the utility grid well you still have the resources of your local area network and central and your local server. In this case, and even if you lose the micro grid, the individual home has its own storage and can run for quite a while, even with no resources. The other way around to look at it is if you lose one node you lose one know the rest of the micro grid operates just fine. So, as I mentioned, we decided that we needed to start this out in a place that's non regulated and build it really quickly and through relationships, which is always the key to everything. We were able to start this year actually with permission and get an entire DC micro grid installed on a military base it's currently it's here at Kirtland or first base and it's actually up and running and I'd love to give you a tour if you're ever in Albuquerque just give me a call. I built a community center for the Air Force Base called the gathering space which we use as a demo space when we can show you on the big screens and actually move energy around and show you that. And one through and six on this picture is military housing temporary lodging facilities and eight is some CNI loads just small laundromat check and building machine shop which is fun loads. C one is very important that is our central control box, and that is our tie into the San Diego national labs. P cell, which we call the photo of attacks systems evaluation lab where we have another 30 kilowatt or so sore and some really good testing facilities there, but in nine on the other side is the most attractive part of this micro grid. And nine is Tartan tried into sending a national labs, dental the distributed energy technology labs where they have three hardware in the loop micro grids. Additional ground based solar which we are tied into. But most importantly they have testing facilities they have programmable loads they have programmable generation they can test for lightning EMP ground lift and cyber which is part of our cradle cloud of research development with them. So we have a system that is being a cyber for everything from our overall system to EV chargers we do have a normal level to charger but we also have a level three charger is all DC to DC that runs completely off the solar in the system outside of our community center. What we got out of is the timeframe we got this all done in, which is literally all this year. So January to July, we actually built it. We had our ground ground or ribbon cutting on September 6 and we've been commissioned in other sense and we're ahead of schedule on that and it's going really well. The five hours of resiliency is just a quick thing to show. And I'm trying to get through this really quickly so that because I really want to respond to questions and have people ask questions, but the way the military or the Office of Energy Assurance defines resiliency which I really like as the five hours. We've done and see resourcefulness before the event but after the event which is the most critical part response and recovery and the way we do our control system. We call it directed energy you can literally direct energy to any building in the system post event in a limited energy situation and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a while. We have our first three commercial micro grids up and running. We have the conduit in the ground for the building of homes next year these loops are 350 home loops, which we will show interconnected and networked capabilities between three DC micro grids and we are also going to hook in an AC micro grid just to show that we can. I just want to talk about our UI UX our user interface and user experience. We have an operator level for the utility where they will know where every single electron is. This is actually a screenshot of something that is in motion you see the dots on some of those lines there they move in relationship to how much energy they move faster or slower is how much energy is being moved and in which you can see the direction whether it's going from the solar panels to our EV chargers or to our central battery or even out to the bulk power grid. Or, or back to the homes when it's dark at night for instance, and you get every dashboards that show you the state in charge of all the batteries, and you know where every electron is at every moment. Let's take a moment just to talk about our control system in each and every single nano grid box. So we have nano grids, which is each building I'll just go back to that show that each building is a nano grid, nano grid and our system and that nano grid box that's outside of each one, again has a controller in it that again uses machine learning to learn its load from each home or each building. And so it knows exactly who's in the house when loads actually occur when the peaks are unique to that load, but it practices game theory. So in other words, it's very aware of its own loads and we'll make sure that the battery state of charge from a power and energy standpoint is there. It also is very aware of the community goals in the micro grid. And so it plays with those the rest of the nano grid boxes and the central box the central box is the same actual controller, but it takes on the role of auctioneer and sets a price for the micro grid. The price is not a real dollar amount, it's just an indication of whether the micro grid is long or short on energy. And that makes then that determines what it does with the central storage with any central generation whether it pulls power from the grid as necessary or if the grid is gone. It sends out signals that tell everybody to save energy and to be more efficient and effective with it. It also can provide a voltage bar frequency support back to the utility grid we really want this to be an asset at the end of a feeder. And you don't have to upgrade your feeder the more you add of micro grids they basically take care of themselves and can be I did completely. And so puts very little stress on the utility grid, but the utility grid can use it as an asset as I said, when it's long on energy it can it can charge batteries in the micro grid. In order to balance or it can take energy for frequency bar support, etc. Anyway, I know that's very quick, but I again I wanted to get through questions. There's my email in case you want to contact me for a tour of the micro grid and I will stand for questions. Thanks. Thank you, Gary. And I'll remind everybody the way to ask questions is through the question and answer interface in the zoom webinar you can type your question in there. And I will repeat it to Gary. I'll start you off Gary while we're waiting for our folks to ask their questions. I'm curious what you see as key research questions to either scale your micro grids and or expand their capabilities. Well, that's a great question. I'll start on the technical side remember I did state earlier that our biggest risk is in the regulatory environment. Micro grids are a new thing to regulators they don't really understand them and they have meant different things to different people in the past. And so part of the problem that you that we have in that situation is no set of rate payers are meant to be unfairly burdened for the benefit of other rate payers so this is why we've had very little innovation in the last 100 years. But that is our biggest risk but setting that aside our technical risks. So what we're going forward are of course the adoption. First of all, is getting people used to the fact that DC is effective. And of course, when we ask our vendors for different components, they're not used to this kind of use of products. So DC to DC converters and inverters that go 380 DC to split phase AC for each individual home, etc. So we are looking for the most robust and readily available and ready to scale. Because remember every single nanogrid box is the same regardless of the load of the individual building. The standardization is very important, whether it's two people in the building or six or, or 20. EV no EVs three EVs and so we want very robust nanogrid boxes that can then be used in aggregate and even in parallel for larger buildings and larger loads so that we can keep that standard box the same. So that's a very important to us so research along the lines of higher voltages are bus voltage right now is at 750 DC, we'd like to move to 1.5 which would allow us to go farther geographically do the voltage losses in the line. And so those those that's where we're going. The next place we will also go is to larger CNI applications where you would normally expect, you know, large three phase motors at 480 type of loads. And so we're looking for help and research there.  You know, that would they would like to incorporate into a system like this. I hope that answers the question. Does thanks do you want to give us a little tour of what we're looking at right now with this interface. Yeah, so this is the UI UX I talked about we're working with a local company. RS 21 who those of you who are on the call probably know that that's Charles wrath who came out on an entrepreneurial leave from sandy national labs it's his company. One of the things we love about New Mexico the CTO Cameron Baumgartner was my son-in-law's roommate in college. But but we were very happy with this user interface and what it does is it shows where every electron, every watt goes at any time you can pick time scales you can. The bottom right is a time scrub bar where you can go back one month, three months a year and and see that and see what's gone on in your system. And then the dashboards on the side, they start with the tons of CO2 avoided. The house level there you see a side by side grid there that can be matched between the dashboards between an individual home and the entire grid you're first seeing the whole little micro grid we've got this is actual GIS data 3D modeling of the actual base configuration of that micro grid. So that's what it's showing there and then it'll go into the different dashboards on the left. This is a screen recording. This is not real time right now on the base. But this is a recording of kind of data. And, and like I said, you can actually see energy flows moving back and forth. Also from a diagnostic standpoint, you can things turn yellow or red, depending on if they're in trouble. And so if a state of charge of a battery goes yellow or red, we would be able to know that specifically. The term for the operator would be that you'd have a nice glowing green dot on a screen, which is each micro grid in a series of micro grids. If it turns yellow, you would double click it, it would go to this view, you would be able to then see what was yellow or red in this view, and go right down to that component level, you know, send an energy technician out there to just swap out the component, take it back to the shop and find out what was wrong. And the goal would be is that no one has even had to reset the microwave clock because remember everything runs off of batteries and has several hours or, or even days, depending on how the energy is managed and limited energy situations of energy before you have to supply more energy. Thanks. I'm another, there was another question that came in as you were speaking before, and it was how are end users notified to conserve energy, as you mentioned. So again, it's the psychology not the technology so the, the, the, if you look at that middle panel that's showing right now that's what one of the views that the individual consumer could see and the cool part about getting second by second data is, you would know exactly which the algorithms are already there you can see it in products like sense etc I've got one on my house right now. You can see when your refrigerator turned off when you can turn it on, whether it's being 15% or more less efficient this year than last you can tell when your conditioner needs refrigerant you can see all of that. And so they'll get the benefit of knowing all of that. They would get a text message, basically saying we've got a limited energy situation on the micro grid, or on your individual nano grid, due to X event. Therefore, you may want to turn off and it would tell you exactly what to turn off to conserve energy. Let's say this happened at 10 o'clock at night and it was in the middle of winter and you want to make sure that your heat runs through that through the night. It would tell you what you could do to make sure that you run through the night, etc. Long term, as appliances become available and if you look at LG they're already offering products that are DC and AC and I can tell you right now that I can talk to my refrigerator and my washer and dryer in my house now. That will continue especially when these types of products are available to accelerate and eventually you could set preferences ahead of time so that that would automatically be to be done by your nano grid box controller. It would automatically go in and do things like either delay your or your dryer coming on, or actually even limit appliances in a situation where you would prefer that you have heat through the night versus anything else. So if these systems are in front of the meter and potentially utility owned, then would the utility have the control to make those decisions possibly in the military situation they would in the consumer they would not so let me explain. And then there's also privacy issues in here too so let me just want those all together. We know that there are going to be some consumers that would be like, you know, I don't care about any of this just I want the lights to go on one night during the switch. Fine, that's some percentage which I think will diminish over time but there will there will always be some section that do that. There'll be the middle part the middle part of consumers that or percentage of consumers that would just they want to set preferences and then just leave things alone and get alerted if something goes out of range.  They would be able to see their own house they would be able to see the aggregate of their neighbors houses and how the grid is doing, but they would not be able to see a specific other neighbors house. We would give the control knob to the operator in a base situation. They could have anarchy mode, which would be that they let every all the controllers just talk to each other and run. I don't think that most utilities will do that they'll want to have their finger on the scale. So that would be in control mode control basic control mode would allow them to control for major events and and direct energy as necessary to keep the most consumers customers ratepayers whatever you have happy. And then they would have what we call internally dictator mode that probably won't make it all the way to market and I apologize for even saying that out loud on the webinar. But that would be where in extreme limited energy situations that they could literally decide through pricing who got energy and who did not. That's that's mainly for people who are running military installations or campuses. Okay, thanks and we have a comment from Jack Chakowsky, who's chair of the New Mexico score State Committee and a member of the Association of Commerce and Industry in New Mexico, I think he's on the board there as well. And he says, Gary, don't forget to approach the ACI if you need assistance with any New Mexico legislation help. And the Economic Development and Technology Platform Committee has been a long supporter of EPSCORE and the use of related technologies that can benefit our state. So, know that you have potential supporters there to to advance your agenda. Thank you, Jack as a former board member and member I was I ran the medical services and committee for that for a while when I had that medical company I told you about earlier. I'm a big supporter of ACI and what they do and and understand that if we don't have a seat at the table you're on the menu, legislatively and absolutely will approach ACI we've been. This is we've been kind of in stealth mode we're just now coming out and just now starting to be commercial but Jack appreciate that and would love to come and give a quick demo to any ACI group that's interested. Thanks. Well, I'll ask one more question. Remind our folks who are attending that this is a good time to type your questions into the Q&A box. But just because our project has so many students. I'm wondering what what future workforce you see that is in demand at skills that our students should be trying to get so that they can work in these areas and work toward the future grid and in the future grid workforce. I'll give you, I'll do better than I'll give you a contact at each of the universities. If if you're talking about an energy tech, for instance, at the six week at the entry level. Which is probably not this the audience we're talking to but I'll just start there. You would talk to Kyle Lee at ingenuity for CNN they have they're working with workforce solutions and and Bill McCamley current director there as cabinet secretary excuse me on a energy tech curricula. And also with the Albuquerque Academy to even eventually get that into high schools, the UNM level you would talk to Ali Bidram, who recently took over for Andrea Mamoli, who literally has a micro grid curricula there within the mechanical and mechanical departments. And then if you're at NMSU I would go talk directly to Olga and and and get involved in that way. And all of the people I just mentioned have complete access to this and to me and to anything that we discover. And we are always looking for interested students and thought leaders for that matter to join us in this and to progress this model. Thanks. Well, two of the three of those folks from our project team and also at Santa Fe Community College we're starting the smart and micro grid training center I think Frank Curry joined them this month and is potentially on this webinar today. So, that will be a good person for you to connect with to and for him to connect with Kylie at CNN. And we partner with Siemens and Frank if you're on the call I apologize for not getting up there yet I've just been a little busy installing this micro grid and commissioning it but I really need to get up to Santa Fe Community College. Well he's just started to so this is good timing. Well I don't see any other questions coming in from our folks and Frank says Frank is indeed on so great that we've made that connection here today. So we will end this webinar a bit early but as a reminder it will it is recorded and will be archived on our website so folks can revisit this and also our project team members who weren't available to make this time today. We'll be able to hear it and I know that there will be many future connections between your projects Gary and our work at the New Mexico Smart Grid Center so thank you very much for your time today presenting. And as a reminder to all of those on this webinar today our next webinar will be November 22 at noon and it's the New Mexico National Laboratories presenting on issues related to micro grids and research that they're undertaking so. Thank you again Gary for your wonderful presentation and this great work that you're doing in New Mexico and we will be back on next month with you all. It was a pleasure. Thank you.


The document itself is sensed of light, so when it comes to photographing, we shall show you a... That is the thing itself. But no more light, please. There is the Magna Carta of Glock 15, the Lincoln document. Pete's going to ask his staff a little bit because he's going to release his photo of the press. No flash. No, we know about that. When you want to take photographs, we will put a dummy on it because it's sensed of light. I didn't feel afraid, so when that... But isn't it, you see, it's a working document.  It was obviously written with astonishing skill, but not unless in a hurry. And it arrived in Lincoln on the 29th of June, 1215. Very insane. The fire starts here, Mr. President. They told me that a gas will be released and the gas will put the fire on it. They've got precautions that are just things that... Yes, I think it's over for me. I've never heard about that. Did you get the... what do you mean? Did that work all right, Pete? Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Don't worry about it, Mr. Nurse. I know what you were talking about. You know, when we held the first economic summit, I wish I was to be here in this country. We didn't. When you heard who was held together, who you've been there. So the first night was a dinner for the seven heads of state in what had been the British Governor's residence. And I was all prepared so that when we sat down, I turned to Margaret Thatcher. And I said, you know, if one of your predecessors had been a little more clever, and she interrupted me and said, yes I know, I would have been hosting this guy. Which was exactly what I intended to say. You saw, wasn't you? No. It's a great day, my friend. I'm going to church estimate. I spent a great downgrading of history when a poet recently at one of our great universities showed that students in their third year at the university didn't even know which side it was. One of the people at our tech bar said that just a poet in a high school recently and asked them, did they know what the Magna Carta was and one out of 40 raised his underhand? Well, I'm going to have to identify and do it because it's for the press. It's great to be on the memorandum. That's right. We could give it ourselves. I think I'll remind the press chief that this Magna Carta was the beginning of all these troubles with Congress. I guess those people out there are all concerned about it. Let's see if we have to go out the same way we can. I think we should go out this way. That'll be great. It's pretty heavy.