Please take your seats. We're about to begin our keynote speaker. And actually, for those of you who are in the back, I would encourage you to move up. There are quite a few, a lot of people at the back of the room, and quite a few seats open in the first five rows or so. So please come up and so you can see and hear better. It's my pleasure to introduce to you our keynote speaker, John DeRochet, who is Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Egypt and Maghreb Affairs, a position he's held since September 2014. John has served extensively in the Middle East, as well as Africa, including positions in the US missions in Baghdad, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Monrovia, among many other assignments. And I know John from our time together at the State Department, he's really a very much a respected expert on this region. Now, John has kindly agreed to speak to us about US government views of security, democracy, issues in North Africa, and the Sahel. So he's going to make some moderate conversation. Centuries, we've seen an ebb and flow of people and empires and tribes and religious and languages and cultures across this very diverse area. And the influence that that area has had across the continent and beyond the African continent. And so when you look at that very broad historical perspective and all that's happened in history, perhaps the developments in the region today, we shouldn't think of it so unprecedented. That may be so, but it's also not much consolation for those of us who try to develop and set US policy in the region as the region itself faces a number of challenges. Continued instability in Libya and Mali, the growing presence of violent extremist organizations, the migration issue, the democracy in Tunisia that is new and admirable, but also very fragile. And tense relations between two of the key countries in the region, Morocco and Algeria. And so I'd like to sort of talk about how the US government looks at some of the challenges in the region and how we're trying to find meaningful opportunities with our partners in the region to build security and stability and economic growth. And I think I probably should start by talking about Libya, which I don't think there would be much disagreement, would be the largest and most immediate threat, the conflict there, of the largest and most immediate threat to regional stability. So in mid-December, we saw the signing of the Libyan political agreement and were signed in order to form a government of national accord that came out of dialogue that went on for a year or longer that seeks to end the conflict and reconcile the various rival factions there. On January 25th, the Libyan House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly 97 to 7 to approve that political agreement and to endorse the presidency council of the government of national accord. But as you know, it's not as simple and straightforward as all of that. There are plenty of obstacles, and the political process there remains complicated. And the steps that needed to follow the agreement on the LPA, the Libyan political agreement, and then the House of Representatives vote have not happened. That needs to happen quickly. I mean, fundamentally, at its heart, pardon me, Libya needs a stable and inclusive government that is united against ISIL and other violent extremist groups in order to restore security. Libya's economy has deteriorated significantly because of the conflict. Oil exports have fallen to less than 25% of what they were at their peak. And as those of you who watch this region closely know, ISIL has been active in the oil region of Libya as are our other terror groups. And obviously, restoring that oil production and at the same time strengthening the important economic institutions in Libya is going to be one of the first fundamental steps that's going to have to happen if Libya is to have a successful future. Let me turn for a moment to Mali. And Mali, we're cautiously optimistic about the ongoing talks between the armed groups and the Mali and government. Still, we think the government of Mali needs to take a greater ownership of the peace and reconciliation process. It also will require a successful implementation of the peace of court, I should say. We'll also hinge on the government of Mali's undertaking some robust service delivery in the North and the international community's ability to strengthen Munozma's capabilities to enable it to more effectively carry out its mandate. Now, in both the Libyan and Mali cases, we can't, and I'm going to spend a little time talking about violent extremist organizations, and we can't overlook the role that they are playing.  The additional factor of adding these violent extremist organizations add a horrible new dimension to it, not only for people in Libya and people in Mali, but as a threat to the broader region. On Libya, ISIL is quite entrenched insert and is looking to expand its territories and build networks in Libya. The vacuum of authority that exists in Libya has enabled ISIL to develop its most developed branch outside of Syria and Iraq, beyond cert. As of late last year anyway, and in the beginning of this year, there is ISIL presence, if not quite as entrenched, but there's ISIL presence in other parts of the country in Benghazi and in Tripoli in Ajdabiya and in other areas. ISIL was exploiting that ungoverned space and has used that ungoverned space to launch attacks both within Libya and elsewhere. Mali, the security environment remains fluid and the potential for attacks throughout the country, including in Bamako, remains high. Terrorist groups operating there continue to threaten small arms attacks against soft targets that are very difficult to protect, very similar to the terrible attack that we saw at the Radisson Blue in Bamako last November. From Safe Havens in Mali, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, AQIM, continues to exploit weak governance, insecurity and economic fragility to attempt to expand its influence. And the group has demonstrated a willingness to work with local militants to incite insurgencies as well as with transnational organized crime groups to accumulate wealth and weapons and fighters. The net effect of this has been a real drain on Sahel resources, a crowding out of legitimate commerce, increased corruption and impeded economic competitiveness and trade. While profit-minded criminals generally do not seek political power, the recent attacks in Mali and Burkina Faso show that AQIM can leverage these networks to create environments where they can thrive. So, I mean, in addition to these issues that I've outlined with the violent extremist organizations in these two specific countries, I should just mention that more broadly, of course, a very troubling aspect of regional insecurity is the pattern of human trafficking that helps finance criminal and terrorist networks. Human trafficking, of course, violates human rights and does so very fundamentally. It also, even further, degrades security by leveraging corrupt officials, forced borders and lacks enforcement to orchestrate illicit trade. It has become a lucrative source of revenue for transnational organized crime and terrorist organizations estimated to produce tens of billions of dollars in revenue every year. The ongoing migration crisis, we believe, will fuel an increase in the global volume of human trafficking victims as men, women and children continue to undertake risky migration and inevitably fall prey to sex trafficking or forced labor or debt bondage or other crimes. And this continuing rise in global displacement and dangerous migration, both forced and opportunistic movements within countries and across national borders will continue to allow criminal groups and terrorist organizations to exploit vulnerable populations. So I've laid out pretty well what we see as really major threats. What I'd like to do is talk a little bit about some of the individual countries that I focus on in my work and one thing that's become very clear to me in my time in this job is that it's very hard to speak generally about these countries. It's very hard to draw broad conclusions or make broad statements. They're all very different. They face very different challenges, respond to them in different ways. And so let me just spend a little time talking about each of them. Of course, one positive thing we've seen in the region coming out of the tumultuous changes over the past few years has been Tunisia's transition to a democratic government. Tunisia recently celebrated its fifth anniversary as a democratic nation. Since the revolution, the country and its leaders have addressed and in many cases have managed to overcome some very deep divisions on key political issues. They've developed a new constitution and elected a new government. And all of us praise Tunisia for that and we certainly should do so. We saw the Nobel Prize. There's many other accolades that Tunisians have legitimately earned, but it would be foolish of us to not also recognize at the same time that Tunisia faces very real challenges. First and foremost, it has a young, impatient population that feels it has yet to see the benefits it expected from the revolution. And of course, Tunisia also confronts the threat of terrorism from groups in Libya, in addition to groups operating within Tunisia itself. Tunisia, of course, is known to be the source of a lot of foreign terrorist fighters that operate in the region, some of whom could be returning from Libya or returning from Libya and other places. The attackers at the Bardo Museum, the attackers in Seuss, both attacks claimed by ISIL, we believe trained in Libya. These attacks and the terrorism threat have of course done real harm to Tunisians tourism sector, which is critical to revenue and jobs and just exasperated, exacerbated problems that the Tunisian government had already inherited problems of high unemployment, particularly youth unemployment and high budget deficits. What we want to do, we see Tunisia as a very important partner in a very difficult region. And what we want to do is cement a partnership with Tunisia, help the country confront its economic and security challenges and continue our economic security and governance support going forward, which I'll talk a little bit more about. And not just us, but also with international partners who also understand how important it is for Tunisia's democracy to succeed, to work together, just so that we're all pulling towards the same goal. A few words about Morocco and Algeria. They may not be on the front page as much as say Libya is, but it's essential to examine those countries as well and as we look at a security model from North Africa. In Morocco, the Moroccan leadership has been very effectively managing the need and the demands for reform with maintaining stability. But Morocco also has some challenges. There are also, as folks know, it has a foreign fighter issue of its own. A number of Moroccans have gone abroad to join jihadist movements. I see just yesterday or the day before another press item from Morocco of another group that had been rounded up that posed a threat. And on the other hand, there's been important steps taken and Morocco has done a great deal to open up and to diversify its economy. Of course, the US has a free trade agreement with Morocco, which has been very beneficial to both of us. But like a lot of the region, most of its neighbors, Morocco's economic well-being is in many ways tied to the well-being of Europe to the North in ways that are very much outside of Morocco's control. In Algeria, a real bulwark against insecurity in the region is facing a political transition and the drop in oil prices presents very serious economic challenges for that oil-based economy. Over the long term, it's going to, Algeria needs to look at how it might diversify its economy away from hydrocarbons and look at ways that bureaucratic and regulatory reform could increase foreign investment and generate that kind of economic diversity. Also, just speaking a bit more broadly, one thing that we have to mention is that despite sharing very many common interests and common challenges, the countries of the Maghreb don't have a very strong regional coordination mechanism that political relations among some of the countries in the region are very in their strength. Trade among them is, as in the broader Middle East, trade among countries is very very low, which we think is unfortunate. And then, of course, tensions over the issue of Western Sahara stand in the way of what could be greater regional collaboration. So how do we, given all that I've laid out, how do we try to, as the US, look at this going forward and try to choose a path forward? What we try to do is find areas of common interest with our partners in the region to build the security and stability and economic growth that we need. In Libya, of course, in Libya our focus is, has to be the government of national accord and completing the process of forming a government of national accord. That very strongly needs to be concluded, the government needs to be seated and triply as soon as possible. When the Libyans reach that point, we're ready to assist the GNA in restoring stability and rebuilding the economy. We recognize the challenges that Libya faces, but we need a political accord to really be able to begin to address them. Political and security efforts have to reinforce each other. I mean, fundamentally, if the Libyans going to succeed, the ungoverned spaces where ISIL can operate need to be filled with Libyan government authority. We are, not just us, but the international community will be ready to provide security assistance to a government of national accord when they request it. It's very important that, however, that outside groups not provide support to any of those who do not agree to work with the Libyan government or try to undermine a unity government. That's something that we need to work very hard on. On the Mali side, I'll just say that we are working on a number of steps. We're working to implement the accord for peace and reconciliation in a thorough inclusive way. We're working to stabilize the security situation in Northern Mali and support efforts counter violent extremism. We're working in partnership with the Malians to strengthen democratic processes, institutions, and advanced development goals, particularly in food security and health. We've been actively supporting implementation of the accords, engaging both with the government and the Northern armed groups every step of the way. And we continue to press all Malian stakeholders to take full ownership of the process and ensure a lasting peace. And likewise on the security side, we're committed to working with the government of Mali to implement security assistance in coordination with other donors to strengthen democratic institutions and civilian control. We've also provided a lot of support to the judiciary in Mali, to military law enforcement through training and other support. And the attack on November's attack on the Radisson Blue underscored the need for the cooperation on counter terrorism. And we're doing a lot there on security sector reform work and other training efforts to try to bolster the situation there. More broadly across the region, we put a lot of energy and effort into security cooperation and building security capacity, training and equipping partner forces for joint action, funding regional coordination, building up capacity building mechanisms like the Transahara counter terrorism partnership and the global counter terrorism fund. Our basic goals revolve around building internal and border security, enhancing technical ability to interdict and prosecute criminals and terrorists, while at the same time, ensuring that law enforcement capacity is balanced with the required respect for a rule of law and for human rights. One initiative I'll mention in this regard is the Security Governance Initiative, the SGI, which is a multi-year partnership between us and a number of African countries. The ones I'll mention specifically here are Mali Niger and Tunisia. And what we've done in that program is develop interagency teams of our technical experts to start consultations with their counterparts and see if we can together, pardon me, identify key focus areas for each country. And the focus, not surprisingly, for each country is a little bit different, but the things that we have found the most value in working on are border management, police policies and procedures and police engagement with the community, management of security sector human and material resources, which gets to sort of trying to break down a lot of the stove piping that occurs in between institutions, trying to address radicalization problems through the criminal justice system and just helping to coordinate and manage security sector priorities in these countries. Not all about security. We want to boost economic growth in the region by encouraging trade, encouraging trade across borders, reopening borders, rolling back bureaucracy to encourage trade and investment, trying to nurture entrepreneurship. A few examples, Tunisia. We are supporting a Tunisian-American Enterprise Fund. Which is looking to invest in small and medium enterprises in Tunisia. We've established a joint economic commission last year with Secretary Kerry visited Tunis. That's going to meet again in May, here in Washington to work together on ways to strengthen the business environment and encourage bilateral trade. We have a Science and Technology Innovation Fund to build research ties. That's all beyond our normal economic support fund efforts to help build job creation, to help entrepreneurship, to help small business and so on, which is something we've been doing continuously. On the Algerian side, we've restarted high level trade talks in 2015. These things are sort of at their start, but it's a good start. There's a lot of U.S. business interest in Algeria. General Electric and Boeing and Varian and a number of others have done significant deals over the past few years. Very much I mentioned earlier on that there's a discouraging lack of economic activity between countries in the region. That's something that we are ready to work on if partners in the region are interested in doing so as well, because we think that's good for everyone. Let's see. A little bit more about Tunisia. We work a lot with Tunisia on counterterrorism and border security. As I mentioned, we have our economic support programs that deal with entrepreneurship and civil society and so on. We'll support regional elections that are coming up. And we have strong security relations with other partners in the region. Morocco is a major non-nato ally, as is Tunisia as of last year. Morocco hosts Africa Lion, which is a large military exercise in Africa. And it has signaled a willingness to look at greater leadership roles in international counterterrorism for example, co-chairing the GCTF Global Counterterrorism Forum. And with Algeria as well, Algeria is, Foreign Minister Lamama likes to describe it as an exporter of stability. And Algeria works a lot with its neighbors to promote regional security. We talk a lot to the Algerians about this, particularly about Libya, because of course of the geography, Algeria has an understandable concern about the situation in Libya. Algeria co-chairs the Sahel Working Group of the GCTF, and also is part of the Transaharan CT Partnership. And it's shared its best practices on de-radicalization and kidnapping for ransom with partners for example. It's been partnered particularly well with Tunisia and Niger on issues like smuggling, weapons proliferation, and violent extremist groups in these countries, which we think is very useful. So, what we're looking to do is build some sustained close collaboration that matches each of these countries individual circumstances. Just today, I think under Secretary Shannon, I think he's in Mali today, he had finished his travel through the countries of North Africa just this week. It was the first trip he made as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and is spending a lot of time on these issues. And our initial reports has had some very useful conversations with counterparts in Rabat, Naljeer's, and Tunis, and in Mogadougou. And the challenges that the region faces, you've all been discussing, and you all know very well. And there are things that are not going to be addressed quickly. What we are looking to do is build long-term relationships and long-term programs with these countries that nothing's gonna get fixed overnight. A lot of these challenges we've been building up for years and addressing them, this is going to take some time as well. But that's where we see this from a U.S. government perspective. I hope that's been a useful contribution to the conversations you've had today. We wanna talk a little bit more, absolutely. Thank you. Thank you very much, John. So let me just ask you a couple of questions. I'd like to start with kind of a broad issue. So, I mean, for example, during this morning, during the panels on North Africa and the Sahara, we were speaking a lot about long-standing problems, which is exactly where you ended that are going on, whether we are talking about economic marginalization of peripheral and border areas, the interior in Tunisia, whether we're talking about corruption, a major issue in a lot of the countries of North Africa and the Sahara, or issues, for example, in Mauritania of different groups within the society, different racial groups with very unethical rights and so forth, so that there are all these underlying issues that are making different populations and especially young people quite vulnerable to radicalization, right? So here's the question. As you look at what the U.S. government is doing, nature of U.S. government engagement with these countries as a whole. How do you feel we're doing in terms of the balance of military and security engagement versus other kinds of engagement? Now, you mentioned that some of these other things are long-term, but things like education, economy, anti-corruption efforts, these type of things that get a little bit more at the underlying problems that arguably are driving the turmoil in the region and opening up the ground for whether it's ISIS or Boko Haram or whatever. How's the U.S. government doing? Because I have to tell you, at least in the outside of government community, there's a sense that maybe without necessarily meaning to do so that the United States has rushed much more into the security and military space and withdrawn a little bit more from the other kinds of engagement as opposed to what we might have been doing 10 years ago or 20 years ago. It's an interesting question. I don't think we have, but I think that, I mean, partly because of the security situation that the region faces, I think the security situation draws a certain level of attention that's inevitable. But I do think that the two do sort of go hand in hand. My background is on the economic side. I try not to be an economic determinist and say if we just take care of the economic problems, everything else will solve itself. It's because I think that's unrealistic, but at the same time we know that these economic difficulties contribute to the larger security problem. And I mean, you have to address them both because if you want to have the flow of investment that creates jobs that helps deal with some of these, and I mentioned it in the Tunisia context, but youth unemployment is a problem throughout the region, you've got to have an environment, a secure environment where investors feel comfortable. Think they can put their money, they can put the money profitably and have a safe investment. We've certainly, I don't feel like we've neglected the economic and development side to the security side. I think again, the security thing gets a bit more attention, understandably particularly, as we've seen the growth of ISIL and violent extremist organizations in the region. But I feel like in working with my colleagues and then working at, pardon me, the fora that we work in with these countries that we've done a pretty good job of hitting the right priorities. Let me follow up on your comments on Libya. So now, how do you look at this within the State Department and in the interagency with the US military and so forth? It seems to me you have a delicate balance to strike here between wanting to undermine the reach and the military capability and so forth of ISIS and Libya, but also wanting to support some kind of a political process that can potentially reunify the country at some point. I mean, how do, what's the effect of airstrikes and potentially working with different partners on the ground on the political process in Libya? What's your thinking about how all that works out? Yeah, it's a challenge, but we don't believe and we don't think that these efforts need to work across purposes. And they shouldn't if they're done right. Fundamentally, as while the process has been very slow and very frustrating and it feels like sometimes two steps forward and one and a half steps back, the Libyan political process driving towards the formation of the unity government has got to be the foundation of how we approach this and that's the driving effort behind what we do. Because again, without such a government that is able to exert its authority, you can't tackle the ISIL problem, you can't tackle problems of other extremist groups and then the larger economic or criminal problems that the country faces. So, I mean, that's what fundamentally drives everything. Now, the president has said that when faced by threats and plots from terrorism, we will take action against them. And we did so, of course, earlier this week as everybody is aware. That's not the first time we've done this in Libya. We also did this last year against the leader of ISIL in Libya and again, I don't think that these things need to be in competition with each other, that it's not an either or thing. It's something that has to be looked at and addressed carefully but they're both very key driven by this fundamental requirement which we and well, most of all Libyans, but Libya's neighbors, our European partners ourselves have put in so much energy over the past year because until we get that, until we get a unity government that can exert its authority, these other problems can't be tackled fully. Is there tension there regarding the time? I mean, ideally, yes, you would have a unity government and you would have at least the beginning of a unified armed force and so forth to work with on the ground and yet it seems as though the United States has felt compelled to act because ISIS was moving out and beginning to take more territory and so forth. So how do you balance those requirements about the need to act now versus hold on and wait until you've got the pieces in place? Well, I think so far, I think that we've shown that that's possible. I think, I mean, the reality is, I came into this job, gosh, a year and a half ago or a bit more, where we are today in Libya as drawn out as it's been and the struggle that it's been has been, it's gotten a lot further along than I think I might have anticipated at that time. I mean, partly the reality of that is, frankly, I think a recognition among a lot of Libyans about the threat that ISIL poses to them and I think there's a number of factors, I think that's one of them. But we've seen this process move forward. Again, it's frustratingly slow and we and all of Libya's friends need to push it forward but I think so far we've managed that and what we need to do now is to get the House of Representatives to approve the cabinet. We saw some very unpleasant things yesterday where, I mean, the good news is that last night a strong majority of the House members signed a letter of expressing their support for the Government of National Report and the cabinet that's been proposed and unfortunately a very small number of hardliners physically prevented the House from meeting so that they couldn't actually vote to implement this sentiment which is really unfortunate. That's what we've got to push through. We've got to make sure that those spoilers can't control the process and get to the point where we feel that on government space. That's been the problem from the beginning of the Libyan transition with the Mason political institutions not being able to have any act in any kind of security without physical threats. Let me ask something about Tunisia. So look, during the morning sessions, we heard some questions and expressions from the speakers that just not enough has been done for Tunisia by the United States and by Europe that it's hard to understand, although certainly US assistance to Tunisia has ramped up quite a bit from what it was before the revolution, it's still quite small in absolute numbers and quite small compared to what other countries toward it get from the United States at this point. How do you see it? I mean, you've expressed, and US officials always express a sort of goodwill toward Tunisia since that you can work with the government that you want to support them and so forth. And yet, what are the obstacles to doing more with and for Tunisia in order to support this fledgling democratic transition? Sure. I mean, I have to take a bit of issue with the premise of your question. Although I have heard, certainly I have heard the sentiment that you just described, I've heard it myself. We and Tunisia's partners, but just speaking for the US government, have put a lot of our assistance resources into Tunisia. Up to FY16, it had been totaled 750 million. There's another 140 plus million in FY16, so we're talking over that period of time close to a billion dollars, which in US assistance programs for a country of that size is a pretty substantial commitment. And we think that commitment demonstrates how we are looking to help. We are right now, the secretary, when he was in Tunis last fall, noted that we were going to move forward and negotiate with the Tunisians over an additional loan guarantee. Those discussions are going on now. Pardon me, there'll be another substantial benefit from Tunisia that will be the third one of $500 million that we will have done when we complete that process. And so we think, is there ever as much assistance money as you'd like to have? I mean, unfortunately, no, there's always constraints. It's all, if it goes to one country, it's got to come from somewhere else, but I certainly think if you just look at the trend, the effort has been very strong and the result has been very good. The support that Tunisia has is very strong in this town, if I'm not even sure what to say. I think, though, I'd also just need to add that a point that we always emphasize and the Tunisians, to their credit, have undertaken some pretty ambitious reforms, but I've worked in countries that receive a lot of U.S. assistance. I've worked in countries that receive not so much. Foreign assistance can help, but it won't address problems that fundamentally need to be dealt with at home with fundamental economic reform. And like I said, the Tunisians have done an admirable job of, I mean, it's a new democracy, it's a new government, but I give them credit for not shying away from taking some very difficult steps. They've done some banquet capitalization. They've done a public-private partnership law. They're working on a new investment code. They really need to move that agenda forward and have made great progress so far admirably. And it's not always easy. There are, some of these economic models are hard to change and don't change quickly, and it's not without controversy, but that, in the end, those reforms are gonna provide the kind of growth and stability that Tunisian needs over the long term. We'll certainly contribute what we can, but what we contribute can only build on what is a foundation set by the Tunisians themselves. I'm just gonna ask you one last question we're just about out of time, but as you also have Egypt in your portfolio, I wanted to ask about two security issues related to Egypt. Egypt isn't part of this conference per se, but for example, obviously, Egypt is pretty deeply involved in the Libya issue, has very significant border security concerns, and has been one of several outside powers in the region that have intervened in Libya. So how do you see Egyptian involvement in the Libyan case right now, and to what extent are the United States and Egypt able to be on the same page regarding Libya? And the other one is just briefly on the Sinai. Obviously, Egypt has an insurgency in the Sinai, and I think it's no secret that the United States has wanted the Egyptian army, a long-time partner of the United States, to adopt more effective methods in addressing that issue. And how is that going? I, maybe I shouldn't admit, but I have to admit that for somebody who works in this part of the world, my Arabic is not as good as it ought to be, but one phrase that sticks in my head because of conversations with Egyptian counterparts is El Quamia Tain, because every time you start a conversation with Egyptians, particularly in the security sector, they point out that they share a 1,200 kilometer border with Libya, and the phrase El Quamia Tain appears very early in every conversation, and even as poor a language student as I am, it sinks in after a while. Obviously, Egypt has very serious concerns about what's going on in Libya. I spent a lot of time talking about the country to Tunisia's west, or to Libya's west, but of course the country to Libya's east, you know, has those same sorts of concerns. We have found, you know, we've been working not only with Egypt, but with a lot of Libya's neighbors and other partners as we move forward in this process, and certainly everything that I've seen is that the, you know, an agreement that the government of National Accord has to move forward, we have to occupy, we have to get a authoritative Libyan unity government in place that we can start to partner with to start to fill up these open spaces, and again, nobody understands that threat more than those who live closest to Libya, and they get that very well. On the Sinai, that I'll just say that, you know, clearly Egypt does face, you know, a serious challenge there, it has made no bones about that. We continue our conversations with the Egyptians about, you know, how experienced that we've had, might be helpful to them, but probably wouldn't be appropriate to get too much into the detail of that, but it is something that, you know, we're ready to talk to our Egyptian partners now. Thank you very much, John, really kind of you to be with us today. And for those of you here, we're gonna take a short break and we'll convene our last panel here at two o'clock, but first, please join me in thanking John DeRoshaper. Thank you. Thank you.


Hi everyone. Welcome to the SmartGrid seminar. This quarter we have invited Stanford postdocs to share the research with us. Our first speaker is Dr. Nicholas Astier, who works with Professor Charles Kostak, Professor Ron Rajagopa and Professor Frank Warlock. These are the similar presentations for this quarter. It's my great pleasure to introduce Nicholas, who's been a postdoc here for almost two years now, and we'll be going back to France and at the end of the academic year. He's on leave from the French Energy Regulatory Commission, which Russ is a real bonus. He certainly knows his academics, but he also has an appreciation for the regulatory environment within which electric power operates in many countries. He has a PhD from Toulouse in southern France, southwestern France, one of the strongest programs in economics in Europe actually. His PhD was on the economics of modern electricity markets, which makes it particularly relevant for our discussion today. So let me welcome Nicholas, who's going to be speaking on the topic of distributed generation and the need for network expansion. So Nicholas, take it well. Okay. Thank you, Shari. So thank you very much, Chimua and Shari, for the nice introduction. So the topic of today's talk will be, so today's talk is joined with, is some more joined with Professor Rajagopa in civil and environmental engineering and Professor Warlock in our economics department. And the topic we're interested in is the impact of distributed generation on the need for network expansion. So when we talk about distributed generation in the context of the HECD grid, being for now of rooftop PV. And so each time a project that involves rooftop PV makes it to the news. So for example, here this project in New York City, which involves a lot of rooftop PV that made it to the New York Times, you typically get this kind of statement that says this project will help the distribution grid and kind of alleviate the stress you might have on the electricity grid in general. And this kind of statement makes a lot of sense because rooftop PV is located, well, directly on your roof, where you do consume electricity. So you do expect that it has to provide some good benefit because it's going to decrease the amount of load you consume. And so if that's actually the case, that's a huge deal because if you think of how much you pay in your electricity rate for the distribution grid, it's a very large amount nationally. So this chart by the EAA shows the capital spending or spending in general in distribution grid in the U.S. for the major utilities. So that's 70% of the load in the U.S. And so what you see is that it has been increasing and the order of magnitude is tens of billions of dollars per year. So if the above statement that when you install rooftop PV, you decrease the need for grid investment is true, that's a huge deal in the sense that even a few person improvement in how much capacity you need in terms of grid capacity can very quickly escalate to, I'd say, a billion dollar or a billion dollar a year in terms of savings for red payers. So that's a big deal. The issue is from an academic perspective, that's when you actually try to assess to which extent the statement is true, so that to which extent distributed generation, such as with the observer, takes pressure off the distribution grid, it's very hard to converge on an answer and it's a very highly debated topic. And if you compare estimate you would get from, let's say, some consulting firm or some project developer to estimate you would get from some papers in literature or from other consultant, the estimated benefits can vary by one or two or three magnitude. So there is no consensus at all whether this statement is true. And what makes this debate complicated is that there is no real, as there is a very big lack of empirical evidence that actually looks at power flow and an actual grid at a large scale and try to really make this assessment of what has been the impact of adding more and more distributed generation to the grid. And so that's where our research comes in is like we managed to get access to very detailed data for the French power system that enables us to tell some interesting thing about this question. So the outline of the talk would be first on background to make sure that everybody has the same concept about power systems and understand what we're talking about. Then I work this with the approach and how it fits well with the data we have. A little more technical discussion on how we tackle our question from an empirical perspective and then result and discussion. I'll save some time at the end for Q&A and discussion. But if there is some pressing question, there is a Q&A feature and I hope Charlie will warn me if I'm missing an important question. So I guess if you get interested into power system at a very high level, the first picture you will encounter is this one or the version of that one. So that one is from the Department of Energy. But the first thing you will learn is the power system is divided into four pieces. You have generation here, transmission that distributes the generation from power plants over large areas. And then once you get closer to load center, you stay voltage down, distribute to a distribution grid here in Green and you reach end consumers. So the reason why you will always find this picture is that and why historically the power grid is organized like this is for the most part that in this piece here on the generation side, there is huge economies of scale of building very large power plants. So since we're going to talk about France, let's take the example of a nuclear reactor in France. So this would be a 3 gigawatt plant. So to give you another magnitude, 3 gigawatt is like 3% of the maximum load ever recorded in France. So that's a huge amount of electricity that won't be consumed locally. You really have to distribute it over large areas. And this is what the turbine looks like. So there are two turbines in this power plant because you have two generators and these things are huge. They actually have a name because that's specifically designed for the station. And to give you an idea, this red cycle here would be a house. So these are very big assets that produce a large amount of electricity. So you need a transmission grid to distribute it over large areas and then you step down the voltage to reach end consumers. So given this organization, power flows are very straightforward. You generate electricity here, you transmit it over the transmission grid, once you reach, so you transmitted high voltage to decrease power losses, but high voltage can be dangerous if you're too close to it. So once you get closer to consumer, you step voltage down and you distribute it to the end consumers. So you get this top down power flows from generation to end consumer, which is very straightforward. And basically all the architecture of the grid has been planned with this mindset and this operation of the power grid. What changes with distributed generation is that even though you do have some economies of scale, they are much smaller. And so if you take the most extreme example of a sort of panel, this would be the power plant itself. I mean, you will need some inverter and a few cables, but this is enough to produce electricity and you can literally hold it in your hands. So this is not this kind of huge scale assets that we historically had with power plants. And because they are smaller, you can connect them directly to distribution grid. So you would put rooftop solar here on the roof of an end consumer, but there are different distributed generation technologies beyond roof solar. So for example, a small wind farm would also be connected to the distribution grid or a larger PV farm also may be connected to the distribution grid. But you also have like small hydro, like a small dam on a river that is a few megawatt will also connect there or small thermal units such as cogeneration or a waste, a facility burning waste, for example, would also be connected there. And so now that you have started injecting some electrons in distribution grid, this very simple picture of power flow going all the way down from generation to end consumers start to be brought a little bit because you have both generators and consumers here.  So the first, the natural intuition is, okay, power flows are not straightforward, but since you decrease the net consumption, because you generate where consumers are, this has to be good. And even though we don't really know how power flow evolved, this has to be good. The picture is not that straightforward because you don't dispatch distributed generation and for distributed generations such as wind or solar, which are very intermittent. So this is, for example, the output of a random wind farm in France for a couple of weeks. Output is very intermittent and not dispatch. And that might vary across technology. So you don't really know whether when this facility produces electricity, whether when this facility produces electricity, you actually need it. And since power grids are kind of designed to be able to supply electricity in the most stress moment, like these high demand scarcity events, you have no guarantee that it's actually this distributed generation units actually generate when you need them locally. And that's an empirical question. And so the purpose of this work is to tackle this empirical question and to look empirically at what has happened in France and to see whether distributed generation has actually produced electricity when we most needed it. And we look at five type of technologies. We get PV, wind, small light renewable and renewable thermal. We get access to detailed data that I'll describe later. And because the data is detailed enough, we kind of are able to draw statistically robust conclusions. And so in a nutshell, what we find is that we do find very contrasting impact of distributed generation on the need for network expansion, depending on which technology we're looking at. And in particular, we find PV and wind to be pretty much not very helpful during peak there. Contribution in decreasing the highest load level is very small negligible for PV. So we don't expect on average on the population of substation for France a large impact. And we also observe an increase in the variability of the loads as seen by the transmission grid due to the additional PV and wind generation. And if anything, this might actually increase operational costs. So at least from the data we get, we don't find strong evidence that wind and PV have a huge impact decreasing the cost of distribution network. So that's quick. I'll try to work through how we get to those conclusion in the rest of the talk. So what we want to assess is the impact that's adding distributed generation to distribution grid as on average on the need for network expansions. So the best way to talk to this question is to actually look here at this substation that is at the interface between the distribution and transmission grid. And so that's exactly what we do. We kind of focus our attention on distribution substations which are this red cycle here. So if you take real picture and not sketch drawings and you take the French Ecstasy grid which is the case study we are exploring. So this is France. This is the transmission grid which was in blue before. And if you zoom in a given area, you would start seeing the sub transmission grid in purple. And the unit of separation we're looking at would be these dots here which are distributed substation. So those are facilities where you have a couple of transformers to step down voltage from the sub transmission to distribution grid. So this is the point where we observe load. And if you zoom further to the area that this substation is supplying electricity to, you start seeing the distribution grid. And so this distribution grid is of course consists of consumers but also of distributed generation. And so in this case, for example, you would have a small wind farm here that is connected directly to the substation which is here. You would have a wind farm here. And if you zoom down to the low voltage grid, you will also have sort of PV on end consumer houses. And so what we observe is this substation here that aggregates all the consumption and generation from user downstream it. So all this wind generation, solar generation and consumption from these houses and businesses that are here. And the good thing is that we observe over 2,000 substation for friends at an hourly granularity. So we have the hourly load curve for this substation and we observe them over 14 years. So that's the first piece of data we are using. So concretely what it looks like is if you take, for example, a week, you would have the load at this substation for each hour. So that looks like this, for example, for a given one over a given week. So that's a lot of data points. That's over 250 data points, 250 million data points, sorry. And so we kind of structured the pieces of data we are interested in. And so we focus on two fundamental concepts in the power system literature, which are the the low duration curve and the round duration curve, which I'm going to explain right now. I see there is a question that I cannot see it. For some reason I cannot see the Q&A. So first, the low duration curve. So the idea of the low duration curve is a concept that is used quite extensively by power system engineers, because it's very convenient for practitioners. And the idea is very simple. From this row data that I showed you, that is hourly net load levels, what you do is you would sort them, so in that case in increasing order. So I do that for a week, but in practice you would do that for one year or several years. And the reason you would do that is that when you plan for an electricity grid, what you care about ultimately is to be able to supply reliable power most of the time with a very high reliability. And so what that means is you want to plan the grid to be able to reliably supply customers for the high load events, but maybe not all of them, because like planning for everything is costly. So basically what you would choose as a planner is you would choose some reliability special p-hats. And having ranked these hours in increasing order of load enables you to quickly assess how much capacity you need. So here if you say I want the reliability of my grid of p-hat, you can move all the way up to the load duration curve and that tells you how much capacity you need for the grid. And so we can build such a load duration curve for each substation and each year. And that's what we do as a first block of data we use to track how the use of the electricity grid has evolved over time. And to give you some intuition, I'll get back to that later. But so now if you imagine that you used to have a load duration curve, which is a blue curve here, and you add some distributed generation you need that produce a given amount of energy on average. Well, as a grid planner, the impact of this unit is very different depending on when it produces. So if you imagine that it produces predominantly in in hours during which load was already low. So if it shifts the lowest quantiles more, well, you will indeed have a shift downward of the load duration curve with the capacity savings to get here pretty low. If by contrast for the same amount of energy produced, you shift the peak hours more, then you get much, much larger capacity savings. So you really care about when distributed generation produce relative to how high electricity consumption is in different hours for the substation. The second object we look at in this work would be is Audiograms. So it's a more recent focus in the power system literature, which is actually pretty much driven by things we are observing in California. So it's so far it's mostly a system-wide issue in the sense that it's this idea of the California dirt curve. So if you're not familiar with it, it's the idea that once you install a lot of solar PV, you get a lot of protection during the day, but that sunset production decreases and load stays high. So you need to ramp up a lot of gas turbine to make it for that. And you have to make sure that your electricity system actually enables that. So what we are looking at is the same concept, but at the distribution rate level. And so what we do is we take the Audi net level of the substation. We take first differences. So we just take one hour minus the previous one. So for example here, load is increasing, so we have a higher ramp upward. After that, load is decreasing, so we have a low ramp. And by analogy with what we do with the load duration curve, we also compute this, we also keep track for each substation in each share of this ramp duration curve here that gives you the distribution of ramp you have seen for this substation by increasing magnitude. So here, for example, this would be the highest ramp downwards. Here's the lowest ramps upwards and in the middle hours during which load was relatively flat. And so at the distribution rate level, you don't really have this system-wide adequacy issue, because it's at end of the IAS level. But you might imagine that if you start having very volatile flows, that means that your transformer setting will have to change quite frequently. That means that it might be harder to do phase balancing. So I mean, you kind of want to keep track of this metric also at the distribution level to get a sense of how it's evolving in the future. And so what is a good evolution and what is a bad evolution for the ramp duration curve? So again, if you take in blue the ramp duration curve for a given substation that you had historically and you start adding some distributed generation units, what you would like to see is some clockwise rotation of the ramp duration curve because that means that the highest ramps got smaller, both in absolute value, both for the positive and negative ramps. And if you see a rotation in the other direction, that's not a good sign because that means that you basically increase the magnitude of the highest ramps you're seeing locally. So that's what we keep track of in terms of use patterns of the electricity grid. Now we have to combine that with distributed generation. We have to be able to say this ramp duration curve has been observed when there was that amount of distributed generation connected to this substation. The good thing is the universe of power plants in France is publicly available since 2017. So we actually observe each power plant and for most of them we observe them at the individual level. So it's one observation, one plant, and the dataset reports which distributed distribution substation is part of this distributed generation unit connector. So we can, for all the green parts here of these pie charts, we actually observe perfectly to which substation the given distributed generation units connect. So there are also these red and yellow slices here for which we need to do some matching because for privacy reasons the smallest unit, so if you have a rooftop PV on your on your roof, you wouldn't appear as a single observation in this dataset for privacy reasons. So those are aggregated which makes it harder to guess where they connect in the grid. But we can form very reasonable guesses about which substation they are most likely to connect to and we actually run a bunch of sensitivity analysis to make sure that it doesn't affect the results. So I refer you to the paper if you have a question on that. But long story short we are able to observe very granularly the universe of distributed generation units and to which part of the grid they connect. And the last piece of good news is that in France the amount of distributed generation collected to the grid has been increasing quite a lot over the period of our studies so between 2005 and 2018 we've seen a very large increase in the amount of distributed generation to the point where today in 2018 there was roughly 28 gigawatts of distributed generation that's about the quarter of the historical peak load of the country which is both very significant and it's also still pretty far away from the kind of install capacity you would need to get like very very deep penetration of renewable kind of system because the total energy generated by sewage generation is still the small share of the total energy generation. So that's exactly it's not being significant but they are still a long way if you are really willing this technology at a very very large scale as we set some targets for. And so to sum up the final dataset we assemble is this combination of grid usage on the one hand so this low duration curve for and renderation curve for each substation in each year which we can match to how much capacity of each technology was connected to each substation in each year. And so having assembled these datasets what we are interested in is assessing the impact that adding a megawatt of a given technology has had on average on the load curve and renderation curve seen by the substations so if I get back to my example of you have an historical low duration curve you add distributed generation and it shifts down so what we're trying to estimate is basically the difference between these two curves so if you add one megawatt say of PV and it happened to shift on average low duration curve like this the difference between these two low duration curve would be this object here that we collect quantile impact function basically tells you for each quantile of the distribution of hourly net load like how much this content has been shifted by the addition of one megawatt of this technology so in that case it tells you that I think one megawatt has had a large downward impact on the lowest quantile but not so much on the peak hours so you're not very happy if you see a picture like this and by contrast if you estimate a quantile impact function that look like this and that tells you that for one megawatt of distributed generation you get a large shift downwards in the top quantiles but not so much in the bottom quantiles then you're pretty much happy because that tells you that this distributed generation technology elevates the stress on the power grid in the hours where it needs it the most so you do what you do hope to have this this downward sloping quantile impact functions and for rent it's the same intuition it's just what what is interpreted as good news is slightly different so again blue would be the historical rent duration curve and purple how it changes once you have added a one megawatt of a given distributed generation technology and so if you tend to make extreme rent worse and so you shift the duration as a rent duration curve in that direction you end up with an upwards sloping quantile impact function and that's bad because that tells you that the extreme rent both positive and negative are exacerbated by the addition of this megawatt of distributed generation and what you're hoping for is more downward sloping quantile impact function because it tells you that the addition of the distributed generation you need tend to decrease the extreme rent you observe on average at the substations uh so in terms of econometrics how we estimate that is is very is much more straightforward than the equation may feel like but it's basically just we regress we keep track of each quantile for each substation in each year for either the rent duration curve or the duration curve and we regress that on the insult capacity adding a substation fixed effect and near fixed effect to control for trend over time and specific condition at the substation level and the coefficients who are interested are these betas here which tells you the impact the average impact of technology on the q quantile of either the low duration curve if that's what's this q keep track of all the rent duration curve if it's around duration curve and so if you stack up this coefficient for all quantiles for given technology so if you say like for example t is p and you you stack up all this coefficient for the main quantile you kind of rebuild this quantile impact function i show you so that kind of keep tracks of what has been the average impact of adding the distributed generation on average on the load curve or rent duration curve faced by served by substations and so for the impact on the load duration curve what you expect is this coefficient to be between minus one and zero because well they produce electricity so they have to decrease load and they cannot produce more than they install capacity and so if you get a coefficient of say minus two for pv for the 0.5 quantiles it tells you that for the average on the population of substation in France adding one megawatt of pv has decreased the median hourly level at the substation level by 0.2 megawatt hour and you have zero interpretation for the rent duration curve if you expect them to be between minus one and one because again you cannot ramp up more than you cannot induce a highest rent than just shifting from no prediction to full steam production and so if you estimate for example a coefficient of so beta point 75 wind of 0.01 it means that on average over the population of substation in France over the period we look at adding one megawatt of wind as increase a third quartile of the distribution of hourly run by 0.1 megawatt all right so two sets of results one sets on the load duration curve and one set on the rent duration curve so for the load duration curve i'll start with a non-renewable thermal so this think of those as a backup diesel generator or gas fired per generation units and so the quantile impact function we estimate for those is kind of a uniform shaped downward with perhaps some more production during peak hours which is good news for the grid and also makes sense with the fact that that for example gas fired per generation units in France are incentivized to produce more during the winter and that's when peak happened due to a quick heating so this this curve makes a lot of sense and tells you that well adding a non-renewable thermal distribution generation as on average help the distribution grid in terms of how much capacity you need in in the long-term equilibrium if you start adding renewable thermal and small hydro to the picture well the venues is now it's a post-sloping so they tend to decrease the lowest quantile more than the upper quantiles but you still get quite a significant contribution in the peak hours so it does help a little bit it's just it tends to decrease load more off-peak than on-peak and and the real disappointing picture we got from the estimate we we got was for wind and PV where we we got this like very concave and increasing functions where it tells you that if we take PV to start with you get like a negligible statistically zero contribution to decreasing load during peak hours which is not super surprising in France in the sense that we're reaching peak in the winter when it's very cold and in the evening so it's very unlikely that the sun is shining then but I guess what what's more surprising is that it goes pretty deep in the quantile so you really have to get pretty deep in the load duration curve to start seeing an impact and what was more surprising was perhaps for wind because wind generation is higher during the winter so we kind of hope that it would have a higher impact on peak load it does have a statistically significant impact so it does help a little bit decreasing the need for capacity investment but it's it's a very small increase so one megawatt increase will on average yield a 0.004 decrease in the 99s quantile so that that was somewhat disappointing and the other interesting feature we get from this graph is on the other side of the distribution in the lowest quantile where we see this very large impact on the bottom quantiles so tv wind but also small hydro and renewable thermal they tend to to decrease the lowest quantile of the load duration curve which historically didn't matter that much but starts to matter a little bit and will matter more and more and the reason why that is is that as these bottom quantiles decrease so the net load as seen by the transmission grid becomes negative so locally there is more generation than production so you start having backfitting hours so power flow flowing from distribution to the transmission grid and if this phenomenon amplifies at some point this reverse power flow start to be actually higher in absolute values and the peak flow you historically had in the other direction and so they start being a concern in terms of how much capacity you need for the distribution grid because you want to make sure the distribution grid is able to deal with these very high local generation hours and so the substation where you observe this kind of phenomenon historically so the substitution for which the peak usage of the substitution in absolute value was reached during which was reached during an hour where power was going from the distribution to the transmission grid used to be very marginal it was like less than 1% of substation in 2005 and that were like small mountain area substation where you had some idle and very little load but we can see that this has been increasing steadily and as of 2018 you get about 8% of substation where you actually reached their peak usage during the backfitting hour and this trend is very unlikely to stop because if you look at the number of substation for which a negative that could happen at least one hour during the year so there has been at least one hour where the generation was higher than local consumption it has increased also steadily and now about a quarter of substation like this so this feature that you depress the lowest quanta significantly that used not to matter that much is going to start mattering more and more because you would have to either invest in the grid or go tail or store but you have to do something about it the second set of result is on the distribution of audio ramps so again ramps are this variation in net load level over the course of an hour so that kind of capture the variability of the load profile that the given substation is supplying and so what we find for several technologies in small idle is pretty much no impact or there's no statistically significant impact which I don't tell us much what's more surprising again and quite disappointingly is that for wind and PV the addition of more megawatt of wind and PV generation tends to rotate the curve in in the bad direction if you wish but then that it tends to on average amplify the magnitude of audio ramp you see you see locally so for if you take the 99s quanta or first quanta adding one megawatt of wind or solar tends to at least we estimate that it increased on average over the population of substation the extreme the most extreme ramp by point 15 megawatt again that's sometimes for a small level of penetration that that that should be largely manageable the question is like when you start reaching very high level to which extent does it do that affect the operation of the distribution grid and create some need for expenses in terms of operations and to give you a sense of what's in practice so that that's not a demonstration that's pure and a good evidence but if we take the the substation I use as an example to explain what the low duration curve is and what the random duration is so the blue curve I showed you was a given week in June for the substation in 205 and now the substation has added over 20 megawatt of wind and PV and that's what the load was in 2018 for the same week in June and so you kind of reach through this feature that the impact on pick has not been significant and you get this negative hours of network and this very large string in in power flows but that's like just to give an intuition of what are the concrete impacts okay so hopefully the main takeaway that I introduced at the beginning of the talk are a little bit clearer now so the purpose of this work was to assess empirically to which extent different distributed generation technology have decreased the need for network capacity in France on the population average for the country over the course of the past decade and we find like that the impact is very different from for different technologies and in particular for wind and PV we find very little capacity to benefit in the sense that the impact on the top quantiles of the distribution of early load levels so the white part of the deterioration curve is small negligible and at the same time they tend to increase extreme ramps so if anything they might even be more likely to increase the cost of distribution networks if we do nothing about it we don't observe cost hierarchy so we're not saying they do is if anything taken as face value without any mitigation strategy that's what most likely to happen and and we don't find such extreme behavior for the other distributed generation technologies so the the ongoing following work is is obviously on mitigation because what we're finding is is is adverse impact which doesn't mean that the technologies are not desirable per se it does mean that they have this impact and we should deal with it there might be a lot of good reason to install them and they may decrease emissions they may be cheaper they may create jobs I mean we're not we're not saying it's a bad thing to install distributed wind or PV we're just saying that we observe that they create this change in use patterns of the grid and it might be a good idea to get a deeper look at it and so what we are investigating right now is to which extent battery storage can help mitigate that and other that compare for example to other traditional approaches such as just curtailing except generation or trying to get more flexible those these kind of things


So today I had a chance to ski on Vokul Flare Uvo. I think they make me look quite good. It's a very powerful women's ski. There is no need to go for a men's ski. If you like to ski fast, if you enjoy quite dynamic short turns. I enjoyed the speed. They were really stable. I loved them in long turns. They were really easy and short turns surprisingly. I think if you are a strong skier, you will have lots of fun on them. So the Flare Uvo is designed for the advanced expert lady skiers. I would say it's probably from the performance range of 1 to 10. There is probably 6 to 10. So it's kind of the top end of the range. Interestingly for this type of ski, it's a non-metal AMOLED. You can take the metal out and use carbon in it now. It just gives a ski loads of energy, loads of pop, but it's super stable. So it's primarily a pieced focus ski. It's pretty narrow underfoot. But it gives you a really good variation in turn radius and turn size depending on how hard you press the edged ski. It's got tip rocker, so it's really easy to initiate. And depending on what length you buy the ski, it obviously gives you the perfect turn radius of the ski.


Valence electron, in chemistry, a valence electron is an outer shell electron that is associated with an atom, and that can participate in the formation of a chemical bond. If the outer shell is not closed, in a single covalent bond, both atoms in the bond contribute one valence electron. In order to form a shared pair, the presence of valence electrons can determine the elements chemical properties, such as its valence whether it may bond with other elements and, if so, how readily and with how many. For a main group element, a valence electron can exist only in the outermost electron shell, in a transition metal, a valence electron can also be in an inner shell. An atom with a closed shell of valence electrons corresponding to an electron configuration has to p6 tends to be chemically inert. Atoms with one door to more valence electrons than are needed for a closed shell are highly reactive due to the following reasons, one it requires relatively lower energy compared to the lavish enthalpy to remove the extra valence electrons to form a positive ion, two because of their tendency either to gain the missing valence electrons thereby forming a negative ion door to share valence electrons thereby forming a covalent bond. Similar to an electron in an inner shell, a valence electron has the ability to absorb or release energy in the form of a photon, an energy gain can trigger an electron to move jump to an outer shell, this is known as atomic excitation, or the electron can even break free from its associated atoms valence shell, this is ionization to form a positive giant. When an electron loses energy thereby causing the photon to be emitted then it can move to an inner shell which is not fully occupied. Valence energy levels correspond to the principal quantum numbers n equals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or are labeled alphabetically with letters used in the x-ray notation k, l, m. The number of valence electrons, the number of valence electrons of an element can be determined by the periodic table group vertical column in which the element is categorized. With the exception of groups 3 to 12 the transition metals units digit of the group number identifies how many valence electrons are associated with a neutral atom of an element listed under that particular column.