Hello, and welcome to the launch of the IEA's first ever Latin America Energy Outlook. I'm Jethro Mullen, head of the IEA's communications team, and I'm joined today by IEA Executive Director, Dr Fatih Birral, and Report Lead Author, Stephanie Bukat. We are also very pleased to have with us today leaders from three key international institutions involved in energy issues in Latin America who will also be discussing the report with us. During today's event, Dr Birral will make some opening remarks, and then Ms Bukat will present the key findings of the report. After that, our three guest speakers from the Inter-American Development Bank, the Latin America Energy Organization, and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean will provide their reactions to the report. We'll then have time to take some questions from journalists. For the journalists taking part in the webinar, we invite you to send your questions via the Q&A function in the Zoom. You can do this at any point during the presentation, and we'll also take a two-minute break right after the presentation for you to enter your questions. And with that, I'll hand over to our Executive Director, Dr Birral. Thank you very much, dear Jethro. Greetings to everybody from International Energy Agency headquarters. As my colleague Mr Madan just mentioned, I am really very happy today to share with you some of the key findings of our first ever report on Latin America. Now this report, ladies and gentlemen, comes in our view at a very critical time for Latin America, because when we look at the world, world energy system, which we do at the IEA on a daily basis, we see that the clean energy transitions are moving fast and faster than many people realize. And we think there is a big opportunity for Latin America to be a key part of this clean energy transition and benefit from this transition immensely. This is one reason we thought we should make this report. The second reason is we are also observing that in Latin America, many governments are putting the clean energy, or in general energy issues, climate change is a key priority for the government programs, the existing governments, new governments taking the offices. So we thought this would be a timely input for their thinking. Now this report carried out with a big team at the International Energy Agency and one of the two managers, the lead authors with me today, my colleague Stefana Bukart. My esteemed colleague, thank you very much, Stefana, to you and to your team also. My colleague, Brandt Werner, who is the second lead author of this study. I am really impressed with the depth and breadth of this analysis. My colleagues not only look at the Latin America as a whole and as a group, but they did also make a country-by-country analysis of several key countries' economies in the region, such as Argentina, such as Brazil, such as Chile, Colombia, Mexico, or Costa Rica. All these countries now have an energy strategy. Their future energy system is an input for their consideration. And I am also very impressed that throughout this study, which took almost a year, my colleagues were in close contact with the governments in Latin America, with the industrial players, with NGOs, with academia, several workshops, several discussions, dialogues, and we benefited from them immensely. And I wanted to thank all of them here at this very meeting. Dear colleagues, when I look at the report, I see one message, a clear message emerging, which is Latin America has a major opportunity at its fingertips. And I mentioned to you that the clean energy is moving fast. And in general, we believe a new clean energy economy around the world is emerging and Latin America can well be a key beneficiary with all the resources the countries in the region has. These resources range from the existing traditional fuels such as oil, such as gas, to lithium, to hydropower, to biofuels, and a wind and other different clean energy sources. And countries in the region has an impeccable reputation when it comes to sustainability. And I would say always sustainability is in the DNA of the decision makers in Latin America. Different countries, different political parties come and go, but it is in the DNA, the sustainability of the countries in the region. And when we look at the numbers, we see the impacts of it. For example, in terms of electricity sector, power generation, the carbon footprint of the Latin America is one of the lowest in the world. About half of the global average takes the huge amount of hydropower, bioenergy, and others. Now, we also look at the current energy system. And we also see that the countries do have, of course, oil and gas. Even though we are seeing a transition to clean energy, we are also well aware of the fact that the oil and gas will be with us years to come. But also we know that their contribution needs to slowly but surely, in some cases, decline to be in line with our climate course. But in the meantime, countries will make the most out of their resources, be it is the oil and gas or biofuels or others. Now, we see that in terms of critical minerals, our report shows, the countries in the region has huge potential. Because when we make the electric cars, solar panels, windmills, and others, we need critical minerals. And when we look at the countries in the region, they have a huge potential. For example, lithium, one of the most prominent critical minerals. The region has about half of the global lithium potential. And we call it the lithium triangle. Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina has huge reserves there. But not only lithium, when it comes to other important materials such as copper, again, a major component there. Chile, Peru, Mexico, significant amount of copper resources. Silver, graffitis, again, the nickel-ray materials. There is a huge potential of critical minerals, of course, to have the potential something to benefit from that economically is something else. So it is the reason why we have this report, to make some suggestions to the countries in the region, what is the best way, how to maximize the economic benefits of these reserves. Now, we know that the countries in the region went through economically a difficult time, and the decade, I should say, the economy increased slowly when we compared the global averages. About one-third of the global economic pace was observed in Latin America. But we think, thanks to all these energy resources, the traditional ones, and also the clear energy resources, there is an important opportunity to use these energy resources to boost the economic growth of today and also tomorrow. When it comes to the climate responsibility of the countries, even though the countries in the region do not make a significant contribution to the global CO2 emissions, most of the countries made significant ambitious pledges and also commitments. And we think if those commitments are met, moving into clean energy domain, there is a lot of oil and gas that the countries are producing today. They may be used for exports, bringing the hard currency money to the economies. But also in terms of the renewables, there is a huge opportunity there. And we think the wind, solar, biofuels will be the three key drivers of the renewable expansion in the region. And thanks to the renewables, new technology emerging, which is the hydrogen, there is an ample opportunity in the region. When we look at the cost, which is a key issue for the green hydrogen or low-cost hydrogen, whatever you call it, Latin American countries ranging from Chile to Brazil, from Colombia to Argentina, and many others, they present one of the most cost-effective ways to produce a clean hydrogen. This is a major, major advantage when all the countries around the world, almost all the countries around the world would like to make most of the hydrogen potential at home, but also importing from the major resource holders such as Latin America. Now, in terms of the critical minerals, I wanted to also mention, as it is very clearly discussed in our report, having the critical minerals at home is something, but the question is, in our view, not only to export the critical minerals, but to refine and process it at home and to get much more value added from this resource. It's a very, in my view, important element that the countries, in my view, need to consider not only just export the raw material, raw critical minerals, but process it, refine it at home, and then export it to other countries. There are some issues we think the governments, as it was mentioned clearly in our report, need to consider. First of all, the transition to clean energy needs to be an orderly one. You cannot go from one day, the economies based on oil and gas, tomorrow everything goes to clean energy. There should be an orderly transition, and this needs to be well designed by the governments, and the governments are here in the driving seat to make sure that their countries, their economies are ready for the next chapter of the economies, namely clean energy economies, but making sure that from today's energy system to go to the tomorrow's energy system in an orderly way to maximize the energy resources. The second one is that we believe the transition to clean energy needs to be in a fair way, in an equitable way, and we need to make sure that all the segments of the population needs to benefit from the clean energy transition, especially those low-income groups, indigenous people, and the disadvantage, economic disadvantage, parts of the population. We need to see clean energy transition with the support of the people. Therefore, fairness and equity is very important for us. We know that the access to electricity and access to clean cooking is still a problem in some of the countries, and we think this needs to be give a high consideration. And again, I wanted to underline the critical mineral deposits in the region is a gold mine. I know they are not gold, but there's a gold mine for the countries, for the economies. How to make the most out of it is very important. When we export it, if we just export it through different trade negotiations, we want to tell the governments, please negotiate the American countries very hard with the buyers and look at the global picture, not only today, but tomorrow, because their prices may go up, make the right negotiations with your trade partners. But also, as I mentioned before, please make sure that you have the investment capabilities working with the companies in your country or in other countries in order to process the processing and refinery industry in your countries and send it to other markets. And here, the Latin American countries have a very important advantage vis-à-vis some other potential exporters of critical minerals, because if it is processed in Latin America, given the clean electricity option there, the carbon footprint of the critical mineral processing will be very low, so provides an advantageous position for these countries. So, what needs to happen in our report that my colleagues put together in a very clear way, there are three areas that I would like to highlight. The first one is the investment. Now, currently, the clean energy investment in the region is about 75 billion US dollars on an annual basis. And in order to have an orderly transition, in order to make Latin America a clean energy powerhouse, this investment needs to double about 150 billion US dollars by 2030. This is definitely within reach because the potential is huge. It is important to make sure that the investors find a good, see the good potential in Latin America. Rule of law is there. Democracy is there. And a lot of good potential for economic growth is there. And I see with the right policies in the countries, I see no major problem the investment will flow and double the current numbers. The second one is that we would like to call upon the international organizations and the countries around the world to support the clean energy transition in the region. In my view, both the regional and international financial institution need to support the clean energy transition in Latin America, which is good for those countries and good for the global economy and also sustainability. And the third and the last one, we believe the regional cooperation among the countries will be beneficial for all the countries in the region. There were a lot of good efforts from, for example, such as Mercosur. Perhaps it is not full success yet, but when it comes to energy, especially electricity and maybe other sources of energy, regional integration and having a clear strategy as Latin America would be beneficial for all these countries in the region. And we very much hope as international energy agency that this report, the first it is kind for Latin America, would provide a good input to build this strategy so that we have an effective and a successful regional cooperation among the Latin American countries. Thank you. Over to you, Mr. Malin. Thank you very much, Executive Director. We'll now have the presentation of the report's key findings from lead author, Stephanie Buchart. Over to you, Stephanie. Thank you very much. I'm really pleased today to present some of the key findings of this first Latin America energy outlook. Latin America and the Caribbean represents 8% of the global population, 7% of the global economy, but definitely as our Executive Director just said, it can play an outside role in the new energy economy. Within this report, we didn't look at the region as a whole, as Dr. Biral said, but we have looked at the specificities of the countries as each country has its own resources, own history, own geography, own challenges, and own opportunities. So to start with, let's have a look at how the regions compare to the global average. First, in terms of fossil fuel share, the fossil fuels account only for two thirds of the primary mix, which is quite different from the global average of 80%, and this is notably linked to the relatively low use of coal in the region compared to the quarter that we have globally. On the other hand, oil represents larger share in the region accounting for the maturity of the fossil fuel used, accounting for 40% of primary mix in the region. But as it is well known, the use of renewable energy has been really a mainstay in the region, especially in the power sector. We see that either power has been really the long-time foundation of electricity at 60% share of renewables within the electricity generation. We really see that it's quite different from the global average twice the rate. In Costa Rica and Paraguay, for example, 100% of electricity is today produced via renewable. We see a similar role and similar role of renewable energy in the transport sector, whereby fuels account for 10% of energy consumption in the transport sector, so again, twice the global average. However, on the energy efficiency side, the region is lagging behind somewhat. Energy efficiency improvement has been much lower than the global rate, and we see that there is a significant room to increase policy coverage on energy efficiency, as less than a third of countries have today minimum energy performance standards for industrial motors and household appliances, and only a few countries have mandatory building energy codes. So this gives an idea of where the region stands today, but what about where it could go? So thinking about the future, we look at the different options that the country and regions could have. So first, on vast natural resources, the region is poised with amounts of renewable energy, has some of the best solar and wind resources in the world, along with either power and biotechnology. So anywhere in dark orange or dark blue within this map will be high quality solar resources and high quality wind resources. So together, this holds great promises for generating cheap electricity as well as cheap low emissions hydrogen. The region is also rich in fossil fuel, accounting for 15% of global oil and gas. As our Executive Director said, the region is today a net exporter of crude oil, but still a net importer of natural gas. But beyond traditional energy sources, the region has also significant reserves of critical minerals, so notably lithium and copper. So overall, the region's ample resource and also long history of policy innovation mean that the region is really well placed to thrive in the coming years, knowing also that the region is quite well placed to access nearly all markets today. So now turning back to the outlook for oil, which is, as I said, the largest fuel in the region's energy mix, accounting for 40% of the primary mix compared to the 30% global average in the stated policy scenario, so which reflect today's policy setting in each country combined also with projected population and economic growth in our detailed global energy and climate model. Oil use is broadly stable and its share is though declining. However, fulfilling all pledges and targets on time sets out a very different pathway for the region leading to decline in fossil fuel use. In this scenario, so in the announced pledge scenario, oil use is cut by nearly 10% by 2030, with most reduction coming from the transport sector, thanks to an increased availability of public transit efficiency gains, but also ramp up of cleaner fuels such as biofuels and electric vehicles with 16 million electric vehicles on the road by 2030. In this scenario, the APS, the announced pledge scenario, one out of five cars and buses sold in 2030 is electric, compared to a less than one percentage point today. But we see great example ready when it comes to electric bus in the region, with Chile and Colombia being in the top 10 countries with the largest electric bus fleet today. Beyond electrification of transport, we see also electrification of buildings and industry accounting for this cut of oil use. But at the same time, as was said, our oil production in the region continues to grow to 2030, led by major increases notably in Guyana and Brazil. In fact, over the period to 2030, these two countries, Guyana and Brazil, are two of the three largest increase in oil production in the world. When combined with falling demand in the case of the announced pledge scenario, this translates in an addition of about two million barrels per day of net exports from the region, which will offer some diversification benefits to the global oil supply. However, any new projects will face major commercial risks if the world is on track to deliver net zero emissions by 2050 as oil demand declines rapidly in this scenario. As mentioned previously, in the power sector, renewables account for big share, 60% of the electricity mix today, and cold use is quite low. So these two factors give the region, Latin America and the Caribbean, one of the cleanest electricity mix already today and in the years ahead. Today, generating one kilowatt hour of electricity emits an average of 220 grams of CO2, which is about half the global average. By 2030, in the EPS to the announced pledge scenario, this rate falls by almost half, well ahead of the global average. This is notably linked to the fact that most new electricity demand is met by wind and solar PV, which translates in the tripling of their share to about 30% by 2030. Of course, each country follow its own path in the EPS, as some countries rely much more on hydro such as Colombia and Brazil, while wind and solar PV is much more important in Chile. Compared to other regions of the world, this CO2 content is very low within the power sector. By 2030, while advanced economies close to the gap, emerging market and developing economies have much less clean electricity sectors. So this clearly provides Latin America with a springboard for transition in the electricity sector and to produce also low emissions origin, but also other industrial products. So now turning to emissions, the region has accounted for 5% of all global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions since 1971. Under current policies, the level of the CO2 emissions flattens up to 2030 and increases by 10% by 2050. We see a very different picture in the case of the EPS, which assume all pledges and targets are achieved in full and on time, so notably the NDCs put up by countries, but also the 16 net zero emissions pledges. In 2030, we see an implementation gap between these two scenarios of about 200 million tons of CO2. So clearly highlighting an implementation gap of between the steps in the EPS and faster deployment of renewables, electrification and energy efficiency are really key measures to cut that gap. By 2050, we see that CO2 emissions are below 800 million tons of CO2, but this is still far above the level that we reach in the global net zero emissions by 2050 scenario. Beyond tackling CO2 emissions, there is also an opportunity in the region to cut methane emissions from oil and gas production, as most countries in the region have signed the global methane pledge. We have assessed, you know, analysis that nearly 80% of methane could be reduced at low cost and around 40% could be reduced at no net cost. In addition to the energy-related emissions shown here, emissions from land use and agriculture sector, which account for around half of all the greenhouse gas emissions in the region today, are very cut quite quickly and reach net zero by 2030 in the EPS. And this is mostly driven by reduced deforestation as over 80% of the forests in the region are in countries which are part of the Glasgow pledge aiming to stop deforestation by 2030. So, to recap, we see that the region, Latin America and the Caribbean, has clearly all the ingredients to achieve a people-centered and inclusive transition, as highlighted in the case of the announced pledge scenario. So first, by improving access to clean cooking, the region could reduce perimeter death from household air pollution by about 35%. So there are 30,000 people. By improving access to electricity, as there are still 17 million people without access to electricity, so really reaching the last mile. And the clean energy transition also offer new employment opportunities with clean energy jobs growing from 3 to 4 million. And this could also contribute to bring workers more into the formal economy. But of course, to achieve that, as our executive director said, we need a boost in clean energy investments. In the EPS, those investments need to double with a shift from a one-to-one ratio today between fossil fuel investments and clean energy investment to a four-to-one ratio in favor of clean sources already in the 2030s in the EPS. But beyond achieving its own transition, the region can also secure its position in the global energy economy. First, by boosting biofuels production, as the region has also potential for becoming an important biojet-cursing exporter as well to support aviation decarbonization. Second, by increasing and ramping up low-emissions hydrogen production. By 2030, we see that the region could produce two million tons of low emissions hydrogen, with half being for export and the other half for domestic purposes. And by boosting also the production of critical minerals, which could enable to increase revenue from critical minerals by 50 percent already by 2030 and overtaking fossil fuel revenue already in the long-term in the case of the EPS. But of course, sustainable success in all of these points, so to increase biofuels production, critical minerals production and low emissions production require adherence to high environmental, social and government standards and inclusion benefits for the local communities. So to conclude, later again, the Caribbean is really set to play an outside role in the new global energy economy and stronger economic growth could be unlocked with sound energy policy and resource development. Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much for the presentation. So we're now very pleased to be able to hear from Ariel Yepez, who is the Infrastructure and Energy Sector Manager at the Inter-American Development Bank. He is joining us live from Montevideo in Uruguay, where the Latin American Energy Organization's ministerial meeting is taking place today. So Mr. Yepez, over to you. Thank you and good afternoon to the Latin American energy community and to our colleagues in the International Energy Agency. It is a privilege for the Inter-American Development Bank to address you today for the presentation of the first Latin American Energy Outlook. The IDV thanks and congratulations for TV Roland's team for this report. And we are honored to have participated in the consultation process and providing inputs and resources. The report has a rich perspective on the region's major advances in the energy transition. Latin America faces important opportunities to accelerate a fair and inclusive energy transition, generating employment, taking advantage of the new frontiers in electrification, developing new fuels such as hydrogen, and enabling a sustainable use of critical minerals for the energy transition. Latin America's region has the cleanest electricity matrix on the planet, with practically 60% of the generation coming from clean sources. The region's ambitions does not stop there. Sixty countries have committed to the RILAC initiative to reach a 70% share of renewable energy in electricity generation by 2030. At the IDV, we are moving forward by supporting the region in the carbonizing new frontiers of energy consumption. In regional integration, which is critical for the energy transition, the bank leads the technical secretariat of the four main regional electricity integration initiatives in the whole region. Together with the Green Climate Fund, we have a structure of 450 million dollars fund with highly concessional resources to accelerate the transition to more resilient electric public transport. On clean hydrogen, the IDV has supported the development of 11 national hydrogen strategies, and these are critical strategic pieces for our region. We are sure the IEA's Latin America Energy Outlook, which has been launched today, will be a benchmark report that will provide key information for Latin America to continue as a leader adopting renewable energy. Congratulations once again to the International Energy Agency. Thank you very much, Mr. Yepez, for joining us from Montevideo. I'm now very pleased to be able to hear from Andrés Rebolledo, the Executive Secretary of Olade, the Latin American Energy Organization, who is also in Montevideo, where he is at the heart of the meeting of the region's energy ministers. So, Mr. Executive Secretary, the floor is yours. We are hosting the Energy Week in Uruguay, and I would like to share with you where we are going with Olade. We are moving forward to an energy sector much more friendly with the environment, and at the same time, more inclusive and more aware of its responsibility by becoming one of the access, and perhaps the most important for the economic and social development of our region. Olade and its member countries are dedicated to a fair and responsible energy transition, customized and specific to each country, Latin America and Caribbean, as the green energy matrix worldwide, and that we are proud of it. This report analyzes the most relevant and pressing issue for the energy and climate agenda for the region. Effences, people-centered transition, critical mineral transition of producer economies, hydrogen, renewable and regional integration. We appreciate cooperation on key instances of regional dialogue, such as the high-level work session in Santiago in March this year. Looking forward to further deepen cooperation between our agencies, identifying common ground across these areas. We are celebrating this year our 50th anniversary, and looking forward to congratulating our 50th agency on its 50th anniversary. Thank you Executive Secretary, Rebel Yedo of Olade. Congratulations obviously from the IAE on Olade's 50th anniversary, and we too at the IAE look forward to celebrating our 50th anniversary next year in 2024. Our third and final guest speaker is Jose Manuel Salazar Shirinax, who is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Mr. Executive Secretary, the floor is yours. Dear Dr. Fratid Virol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency. Dear Ms. Ana Maria Iváñez, Vice President of the Inter-American Development Bank. Dear Mr. Andrés Rebel Yedo, Executive Secretary of Olade. Dear colleagues, it is a pleasure and an honor to have the opportunity to join you in this very important launch of the Latin America Energy Outlook 2023, developed by the International Energy Agency in close collaboration with Olade, IDB and ECLAC. As you may recall, ECLAC hosted the meeting to provide regional high-level experts inputs for the modeling and elaboration of this report in Santiago last March, and it is wonderful that today the International Energy Agency is launching it. As you might know, ECLAC is strongly promoting a sustainable, inclusive, and just energy transition based on the simultaneous advancement of five key pillars of action. First, universal access to electricity based on renewables. Second, significant increase of renewable sources in the energy mix. Third, increased energy efficiency in all productive sectors, residences, and buildings. Fourth, greater energy interconnection and integration among countries to increase economies of scale and security. And fifth, greater energy resilience and security in the face of external shocks. This energy transition represents a triple win solution for our region. It improves the well-being of our societies, enhances the sustainability and resilience of our economic activities, and facilitates decarbonization to protect our environment. To ensure that no one is left behind, we must work towards universalizing access to electricity, especially for low-income households. This might involve subsidies for renewable infrastructure and distributed generation, as well as fostering community engagement. Despite significant progress in electricity access in our region, some 16 million people, mainly in remote areas, still lack access to this vital service. Moreover, an alarming 90 million people do not have access to clean cooking systems, which adversely affect their health. Simultaneously, we firmly believe that the energy transition can serve as a driver of productive transformation towards a cleaner development model in our region. Energy is a fundamental need for all communities and economic sectors. Therefore, the deployment of renewable energy sources and related industries must be based on the development of local and regional enterprises and expanded value chains. This approach enhances economic efficiency, sustainability and resilience across all sectors and holds the potential to generate multiple social and environmental benefits. For instance, our estimates show that an 80% increase in renewable electricity generation in South America could create up to 7 million green jobs and reduce CO2 emissions by 32%. The Latin American region is also blessed with abundant natural resources necessary for sustainable energy production. This includes ample sources of solar, wind, biomass, hydro and geothermal energy. Furthermore, the region possesses strategic minerals, a skilled workforce, engineering expertise and labor capabilities that can significantly enhance the value across the entire production chain. To accelerate national and regional energy transition pathways, we must work together to strengthen key public policies and enabling conditions. This includes modernizing regulatory and governance frameworks, enhancing regional energy interconnection and integration, and improving data and information accessibility for policy and decision making. This report is a significant step forward in this regard, providing invaluable scenarios and insights including a net-zero scenario. The current global context, characterized by multiple crisis, presents both an enormous challenge but also an opportunity for change. This underscores the importance of collaborative efforts between governments, the private sector and communities to facilitate the necessary energy transition. Dear colleagues, we would like to express our appreciation for the collaboration with the IAA in the creation of this comprehensive report, the Latin America Energy Outlook, which will undoubtedly be an essential reference for decision makers and stakeholders in the energy sector. As you explore the report, you will find valuable insights and guidance on advancing the energy transition in a region. As always, our ECLAC team remains at your service for supporting the creation of a more productive, inclusive and sustainable future in our countries. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr. Executive Secretary. So that's the last of our guest speakers. We now have some time to take questions from journalists. So we invite the journalists in attendance to send your questions through the Q&A function of the Zoom, if you haven't done so already. And please, if you can, mention your media outlets along with your question. We'll just take a two-minute break to give you a chance to enter your questions and we'll be right back. Okay, we're back and thank you very much for the questions that are coming in. So we're going to get to as many of them as we can in the time we have. So we have one on critical minerals. How can Latin America make sure its critical mineral resources benefit its own economies rather than just providing raw materials for industries in other regions? And then a question a bit outside the energy sphere, but affecting emissions, obviously. So given the significant deforestation occurring in Latin America, how was that included in your analysis? How do you take that into account in your scenarios? So I think those two questions I'll maybe let Stephanie Bucart, lead author, address those two over to you, Stephanie. Thank you very much for those questions. Indeed, as our Executive Director said at the beginning, there is an opportunity for Latin America and the Caribbean countries to move up in the supply chain of critical minerals by processing and refining critical minerals domestically. And we see that as a great opportunity also for the world because it will mean that those critical minerals will be greener given that processing and refining are electric intensive parts of the supply chain of critical minerals. So with the low emissions electricity that the region has already today, it will mean that we will have access to greener critical minerals in the future. Then maybe on the other question about deforestation and land use in our scenario, so within our model we have worked closely with colleagues from IASA, so covering land use and agriculture sector within their modeling, we have coupled our two models to ensure that in our scenario we take that into account. So it means that not only the Glasgow pledge in the announced pledge scenario is taken into account and we take into account the stopping of deforestation by 2030 for most of the countries in the region, which means that we see a potential to cut greenhouse gas emissions from that sector by two gigatons already by 2030. And in addition to that, given that our two models are coupled, we also see that all the increase of biofuel production is not done at the expense of the land use sector, so it means no deforestation coming from this increase of biofuel production in our scenarios. Thank you very much Stephanie. So we got some more questions, some good ones. This one from Jody Zamora from Agence France Presse, who highlights a sentence in our press release that we put out this morning for the launch of the report, which says, if countries announced pledges realized, Latin America and the Caribbean would see renewables meet all energy demand this decade. This would allow oil exports to rise by nearly two million barrels per day by 2030, diversifying global supply and increasing revenues. And Jody asks, is that the goal of a sound energy transition? So I guess the the dual growth of both renewables and oil exports. And then a question from Maria Monica Montsalvé from El País America. How does the goal proposed for COP28 to triple renewable energy worldwide by 2030? How would this impact Latin America and the Caribbean? Another good question. And then we have one also on the G20. So next month, the leading Latin American country, Brazil, will take over the G20 presidency. What do the IAEA expect from Brazil's presidency in terms of energy and climate? So I think those are three questions that our Executive Director, Dr. Fatih Bero, can take over to Dr. Bero. Of course. Of course. Thank you very much, Jethro. Let me start from the first one. Our report finds out that if the Latin American countries pushed the clean energy options, they would free up two million barrels per day of oil to be exported. So I don't see any contradiction here, because the world will not stop using oil. It will hopefully use less oil in the future, but the world will use still oil. And if the Latin American countries, by pushing the, I don't know, biofuels, by using energy more efficiently, pushing the electric cars, electric transportation, they can free up. They're only the producing oil, oil is produced there. And instead of using it at home, if they can export it to other countries, they can get some money, which will be good for their economies. We don't see a contradiction there. What we are seeing is oil will not be stopping tomorrow. We will still use oil less and less, but these two million barrels per day would be a good contribution from the countries of Latin America. The second question is about renewables. Yes, for the COP28, we have five criteria in order to consider. COP28 is a successful summit, and one of them is the tripling of the renewable capacity. We think one of the regions that can achieve this target is Latin America and the Caribbean region, because we have huge potential. As my colleague Stephanie just showed in a very telling map a few minutes ago, we have huge potential of untapped solar, untapped wind, huge potential and good quality potential. We have still hydro, we have still bioenergy. I think Latin America can achieve this target and be one of the, once again, one of the leaders here. The third question about the G20 leadership of presidency of Brazil. I am very happy that Brazil is going to be the president of the next G20. For several reasons, I am happy, first of all, Brazil is an energy country, and the sustainability is, as I said before, the DNA of Brazil and other Latin American countries in Brazil since 30, 40 years, not only governments, but the men and women in the street. Sustainability is a critically important concept for them. So a country, such a country with a huge energy country, with a lot of experience in the energy sector and also sustainability being a major priority is definitely one of the reasons that I am happy. The second reason I am happy is that it is the voice of the emerging world. We hit Indonesia two years ago this year in India and once again another G20 country, a leader in the global economy. Brazil being a presidency is very good. And on top of that, the voice of Latin America will be heard much strongly at the international forum. It is one of the reasons that I am happy. And I hope that we will hear from the Brazilian government, the priorities. But knowing my Brazilian colleagues, having a good discussion with President Lula in the recent G7 summit in Hiroshima, I expected the fairness and the people-centered transition would be at the heart of the energy program, which is what I hope. And as the International Energy Agency, we are very keen to support the Brazilian government for this very important international role. If I may, Jethro, just to finish this session by saying that many thanks for the colleagues, the friends who are following this, in my view, important launch of our report. I just heard from my colleagues there some 40,000 people around the world, especially in the Latin America following the livestream launch of our report. Many thanks to them for following it. And throughout this, putting this report together, hundreds of energy experts in Latin America did support us, gave us advice, guidance with thoughts, with data, with the views in workshops and bilateral meetings. Many thanks to them. Many of them we already tanked in our report. Thanks a lot to them.  Thank you very much, Stephanie, to you, to Brandt and the entire IEA team working on this very important report. We very much hope, as International Energy Agency, that this report provides the input for the Latin American governments, for Latin American people, to a better energy future. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Birrell. That is all we have time for today. I'm afraid we've gone a bit over time to fit in as many questions as we can. If any journalists have questions that didn't get answered during the Q&A that you'd like to follow up on, we invite you to reach out to our press office and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. I think Dr. Birrell has covered us well with the thanks, so I'll just remind you that the full Latin America energy outlook is available for free on our website, IEA.org, so please do go take a look. It's all there available for free and that's all for today. Thank you and goodbye.


For this sharing, I am Jiaxin from China Mobile. I also have a partner to join me for this session, Mr. Lu Bin from ARM. Currently I'm responsible for two parts. One is Kubernetes. And now I'm a member of Kubernetes. The other part is for secure computing. So today I will focus on these parts, which is based on Kubernetes and ARM platform. What are the potentially future applications? Also, we will know the needs of edge computing and also why Kubernetes fits more for these scenarios. So before we officially start, I will make a survey among all of you. How many of you sitting here work for IoT related design and R&D? Raise your hands, thank you. So the following up question, how many of you use ARM? Only ARM, purely ARM, or any other platforms to be integrated? So when you develop IoT, do you use ARM platform or the other platforms? So you're still on the upper end for edge computing side. I just delivered this in 6.07. So I will share with you about this again. In terms of the operations, operators, the edge computing relating to two parts. One is the network side edge computing. Another is the onsite edge computing. So today we'll focus on the onsite in terms of how to architect your cloud and what business will aid shoulder and how to reduce the cost. So first of all, I will anchor the onsite. Great edge computing. In terms of IoT, what problems will come across in our industry? Actually, this is very clear in our sector. We cooperate with lots of enterprises. Now they're building smart city and smart buildings and also smart factories. A lot are based in the parks or campuses. They actually don't want to enable their workflows to flow out of their parks and campuses and we cannot control. So in terms of industrial scenarios, their protocols are ICANN or their independent or the private protocols, not the IP protocols. So these protocols are not fitable for putting onto the cloud for management. So what should we do? How to integrate these capabilities on our industrial gateways to transfer the protocols and to connect the protocols. And we can take the IP flow. So this is a new cloud scenario. And we need to integrate all distributed machines for better administration. This is our first need. And also low latency. A lot of people will talk about the deployment of 5G. After this rollout, the latency has been reduced. But when we discuss with the industry, they have not very high requirement for latency but very high requirement and need for the distance.  The traffic and speed varies out and also you can enjoy this. But if we offer the internet service for the whole building then sometimes the speed will be reduced. Broadband, bandwidth, no problem. But the speed has problems. So which means if nobody uses it, latency would be very low. But if lots of people use it, latency would be very high. So can you compare this as low latency? Yes, actually it is. But in terms of industrial scenarios, what they require is to control the time within 10 milliseconds. So if you reach 11 or 12 milliseconds, your system will break down. And they do need this distance-based latency, low latency. So for the outside devices, if you will manage them outside, how to provide better distance-based guarantee. In terms of standardization, now we're promoting the TSN networks for the corresponding low latency investigation. And also the data volume and the bandwidth. So the data volume has exceeded the bandwidth and we have millions of levels of the quantity of devices. And also the wide-area network connections are not reliable and very expensive. So in your home, sometimes we will buy this Moscow set-up server. Within it, we will put our own HD video. No need for ROM. Run it on the operator's network to play the video. No need to occupy the bandwidth. Also take this from the cost perspective. Assume we have deployed our services on the network side at computing. According to the pattern of the public cloud, you need to pay every month for connections. And you need to buy the storage. Every month, you need to pay a bit of money, 10 yuan or 20 yuan. Not sure, but you have to pay. Or you need to pay through ITE, monthly membership, or you buy a device printed at your home to provide very stable video service for you. And now lots of people are trying this. Or you buy a USB yourself. The cost is 40-50 yuan. Or you can purchase the other devices. So the users need to balance because edge computing focused on the cost orientation instead of the technology. So on-site will also show the loss of the value to serve. And also in terms of information safety relates to personal privacy data and business data. Very sensitive. And third-party apps. And third-party programming designers. Now we have lots of pilots. More than 90% scenarios are private based in campuses and parks. China Mobile can provide us the 5G infrastructure but the traffic will not go out of their parks. So for consumers, they're still using their own private cloud and their traffic are not exported. So very safe. And in lots of vertical sectors, this is their need because in the verticals, migration to cloud is very slow and also with the edge computing, we will come across similar problems because edge computing will come across similar problems to the cloud computing unavoidable. In terms of safety and security because for the public cloud, a security problem is different to the private. If we offer them the gateway or server services, then their traffic will not be exported out of the parks and they will be connected to the container. And this fits better for the market. And also self-made, local, fits for offline operation and on-premise, independent management, administration, higher reliability because it intrinsically has this self-made attribute. We don't want to... Enable our gateway to go through the breakouts so we don't want to influence maybe thousands of the IoT machines. Otherwise, edge computing would have no value. So edge computing has this self-made attribute and persistent. Lots of people might have lots of solutions. That also can be used. But if the network comes across problems because the reliability of the edge is lower than data center, sorry, what I mean is the reliability of edge computing cannot reach the reliability of the data center. So it's lower. So when we have the lower reliability we need to consider the on-premise management. Which means I am kind of a weak management or administration. We need to upload the data according to needs. So this is the kind of a weak connection with the cloud. Another part is hardware config. Recently, Raspberry Pi just launched the Raspberry Pi version 4. Very good product. Raspberry Pi can run ARM's container. This guy is from ARM. Now the ARM architecture is based in terms of IoT. It has the ecosystem and better than the other systems. And lots of phone run their architecture based on ARM. Another part is machine learning big data. Maybe you have your confusions. On the edge, the data is very small, limited. But you want to use it for big data processing based not like this because in AI and big data we have reasoning and learning. In terms of training and learning, for training specifically, we still think that it's reasonable to be put into the data center not in edge and not in the cloud of edge computing because of the precious resources. So what can we do? Reasoning. We have the models very ready. And we can input the models into our phone or the data center of edge computing. So if we have the video streaming we can use a model to process it directly. And then back end we can modify the model. So in terms of edge computing we have the AI and also on our phone we have the identification services or the image identification relating to AI. Also here, cost is a concern. For example, of course maybe my deep diver not very clear. Say we have a manufacturer from Hangzhou based in Hangzhou they work for a camera. The cost or the price is 2,000. Their camera price is 2,000. And they can provide face recognition service which means when we collect data we have provided identification or recognition services for your face and the accuracy is 60 to 70 percent because the chip processing capability is very small within the camera. After processing they need to migrate the traffic into the edge data processing center. This is one mode. Another mode is they only provide camera maybe only 40 or 50 yuan and for the information capture and they directly export the traffic into data center. In the future with the edge computing 5G there will be lots of traffic maybe for free. So what they should do is to rent the edge computer VM or CPU to process the corresponding face recognition information which means these are two options for them. So in terms of the manufacturer perspective I want to sell out more and the price higher but from the holistic view the camera will integrate lots of the AIs on the camera. This would be dependent on the integrated cost and price of our solution because you buy a camera the cost would be only 40 to 50 yuan and if you integrate AI applications on the front end the camera would be 2000 yuan but on the road on the street in the intersection you need about 16 cameras so the cost is very high. If we offer this cloud service on the remote end maybe the cost will be reduced because the payment method, the charging method now is not set yet so we will take parallel ways and now we need this infrastructure augmentation to improve the capability of Edge in order to expand its ecosystem. This is CNC enough and edge computing. What kind of a connection partnership have we forged in lots of the open source projects you may find the Kubernetes project. Why we have this? Because in the current Kubernetes environment all nodes are arm and mouse these scales are very small maybe dozens or hundreds of. Lots of topics today will show that we are responsible for maybe thousands of clusters but actually there are nodes quantity very small but on the edge sorry I will skip this part the Kubernetes architecture. On the edge the devices quantity will increase so how these devices work as a Kubernetes nodes to have better management you can see here there are lots of devices and we will have Kubernetes controllers etc but actually very hard to manage very hard to install for IoT device this is too large as I mentioned before lots of problems including communication so it will come across all these problems we can go through Kubernetes to standardize these devices and to manage them all and to manage this as the gateway to provide this to the customer next my colleague Lu Bin will come to stage Thank you Jiaquan while my colleague mentions that the smart cities and other smart projects with IoT would bring us some challenges and one of them is that through CNCF can we manage so many IoT devices so let's have an overall review of them well actually it is already up to the industrial standard and we are thinking about using Kubernetes to manage all of these infrared and Bluetooth devices for example your Bluetooth speakers and your infrared ACs to be all managed with IoT then let's look at the architecture for the Kubernetes Edge this is a very typical Kubernetes architecture master level, master level architecture and maybe in the future we can see many big changes on the master level and this one is a very typical master level architecture and as Jiaquan mentioned in the future our IoT cloud would be all supported locally and the current master level architecture is not visible for that if you remove the cable network cable here then on the Edge the slave 1, 2 could not support and it could not select or communicate and synchronize the local data and another slave would be on the slave end and there are some co-progresses three of them, the first is about Kubernetes and the second is about CNI it might be about Frankel or Kanako and the third would be Kubei Proxy which is about Service Discovery so these three co-progresses would be critical and if you go to check their memory footprint you would find them very high and for the gateways for IoT they would have very small, limited storage so these three co-progresses are like there are changes in Kubernetes and we would remove the unnecessary service and applications but still in each of these progresses the corresponding modules should still include network Service Discovery and container management and they would all be updated respectively for example for CNI the Kubei Edge would be updated to a distributed CNI or as Jaquan mentioned here, about information security the secure networking would be important in Kubei Edge the network is not only distributed but also secure with a VPN channel and of course we need to realize the autonomy of this Kubei Proxy system and in the Kubei Proxy and in the KubeNet they should all realize the Edge Note communication which is distributed and also to have some selection to synchronize the data not only on the API server on the Masters so this is the current Kubernetes architecture for a huge IoT cloud in the future if you include the device discovery into it maybe the Kubei Master Management would be probably up to millions of devices but if you use Kubernetes to manage this IoT cloud what challenges may we have but this slide is about its main advantages at present Kubernetes as a container orchestration it has a general application abstraction and about the dual-cube company which challenges Kubernetes as I said the IoT cloud would be totally different with our traditional data centers so the first challenge would be about limited resource and it means that the gateways compared with the server level hardware would have limited resources for example vulnerable CPU and limited storage and the second challenge would be about restricted network which means in our data center we may use Kubernetes to manage our private cloud but in Kube Edge the APSO may be in the machine room of China Mobile for example and the gateway is in your community, in your neighborhood it might be your home routers or the exchanges in the buildings but they should communicate with the certain Kube master and it will be through internet but the latency would be severe and it would be very highly cost and it is not reliable so it may cause a very long delay or even interruption and then about the local economy we know that in Kubernetes, each could slave node would have a local cache and it would have primary data communication and in the IoT scenario because Kube master is not reliable it is likely to be interrupted at a certain time point and at the cloud and at the edge it could not communicate normally so can we let each edge to discover their frame edge and to have the primary data communication then and also to discover the primary data with the new labels and update together this is about the local economy and then about IoT device discovery you know that in the Kubernetes cluster it does not support IoT device discovery if you use the Xiaomi device you may know that we could evolve a lot of Xiaomi devices into the Xiaomi system and fear it is similar, we could evolve a large number of infrared GKI or Bluetooth devices into the gateway could send it as a primary data to the Kube master and then in the China mobile machine rooms Kube master it could have an overall management of these millions of infrared and Bluetooth devices and then concerning Kube edge it is now under CNCF an open source project and for the time being Kube edge is based on Kubernetes 100% compatible with Kubernetes API and it has customized edge node components and runtime so for each slave Kube net and Kube proxy would be replaced with edge core in a distributed manner and it has a reliable messaging pathway, it means we have a pop-up for registration of these Bluetooth infrared devices and for our internet devices or home hardware we do not want to lose them so we have a reliable pathway for them we also have an edge offline on autonomy, it means at any time point it could be interrupted by the Kubernetes and it could also have the real-time synchronous updating with their corresponding nodes and we also have a very enriched application and protocol support to support all types of devices and it also has a simplified device on access and then let's look at the overall framework for Kube edge from the application perspective for Kube edge its application would be very simple and on the Kube master there is an edge controller and at each slave it adds an edge core memory footprint of edge core compared with the 3 core progress on the Kubernetes slave it is much more streamlined and could be run on the 100 MB gateway and for the edge controller it is on the cloud and it could synchronize the edge nodes and the application status for service to the primary data and it could introduce the abstract API for example for infrared devices or for Bluetooth large speakers it could have this abstract API of the devices and the edge core is also exclusive for this IoT system with an extra device discovery function this is discovery of the devices and we also introduced edge core which means on each slave there is an edge core to manage the application on the edge nodes and to realize the runtime for the pod which means it is a very lightweight Kube edge and then for this which is like the core or the soul of Kube edge and we need to pay attention to four things the first is edge hub and then the meta-manager the meta-data service and then the edge D, a mini Kubernetes and also MQTT which is for discovering devices and for MQTT we could pop all the discovered devices onto the master and then let's look at these four modules one by one the first is Kube bus which is like a CNI plus Kube proxy in the Kubernetes which is like a channel for distributed routing and VPN offering a secure network and then for Kube bus it has the following important functions first through the VPN channel it wants to connect all the edge nodes and for each edge node it could at least discover another one and the second function would be to guarantee the communication between edge node and cloud and the third one would be about discovery of the service which is similar to that of Kube proxy it is like the load balance and then about the meta-data service on the edge because the edge node would be connected with the cloud through internet which is not reliable with a very narrow bandwidth so for meta-data it evolves the following important features first this service is quite non-lasting if the connection between the edge node and the cloud is recovered then it could be synchronized to the edge cloud and because of the narrow bandwidth and instability of a high cost of internet then the synchronization is in an informative way it is not as what we used to have it is to synchronize the increment in the recent time period and the third would be about the decentralized meta-data service as we mentioned for KubeBus it could make sure of communication between the relative edge nodes and if here the edge nodes could be selected by their relative edge nodes it could be synchronized and then about the discovery of the devices for Bluetooth devices it is okay now so for the time being on the ARM platform including ARM 32 and ARM 64 Kube Edge it is available and you could download it and try it on the ARM platform and then for the Kube Edge we still need to further some key features like the unified management of the cloud edge the config map and more device recovery should be involved as well and the road map is here and you can have a look at this for each edge node each edge core could completely simulate a slab function and on the KubeBus master you can see it's 100% IPR compatible and it is not different at all from normal slabs and this edge core progress is very critical in the slab can I zoom in so that you can see it more clearly at present as an edge node its behavior is totally same as that of a slab on the edge node we can even deploy an edge TD symbol in this example we're using a node pod so ARM currently now everything is ready for the next step we need to introduce new features so this is the end of my presentation and our demo, any question? sorry the interpreter didn't hear the question because there's no microphone the Kube Edge is like to distribute the 3 core progress on the Kubernetes and as I said the core thinking here is about the synchronization of the metadata by their increment one is it's also connected to the cloud yes because I said the KubeBus is like a CNI and Kube Proxy and it adopts a VPN channel and it could make sure the master slab and slab slab communication and it also has a load balance and service discovery function so as to make sure local autonomy and the relative edge nodes could select and synchronize their metadata you mentioned the relative edge nodes but for the millions of devices maybe an edge node would also be up to millions of Bluetooth and infrared devices in the D2I farm platform what a heater, your Bluetooth loudspeaker and also your air conditioners at home actually the million level of a gateway would be less in order of magnitude than the edge nodes while you mentioned in one of your slides about the features of edge computing maybe in the first slide and it mentions about information security and I would like to know that when you use edge computing in information security do you have any specific use case while as I said the KubeBus would offer a VPN channel to make sure of the network security and then this could be about the long time we now have kata and gvisor and kata is ready on the arm and tomorrow I'm going to talk about gvisor on arm I have another presentation on that while I understand that some devices may contain some sensitive data and maybe it could run on the nodes or locally can you use your platform to deploy the home architecture yes maybe you can make it a new feature and in our group you could initiate for more discussion involving more people it may involve the security design and have you compared edge x together with gateway yet not yet we can regard edge x as the fundamental operation platform before we discuss this with their operators kubernetes can work as the coordinator on the cloud but edge x is a kind of carrier on the edge on the edge sorry I have used up my time I personally think that kubernetes thanks for this


So we have another programming related topic coming up. Price is right, negotiating prices to reduce performer and speaker fees. Presenting on this topic we've got Cheryl Lee, she's with Contra Costa County Library and we've got Kyle Hval with Mountain View Public Library. So let's get them set up. Awesome, good afternoon everyone, welcome. Hey Mike, can we cue the theme music please? There we go, coming to you live from San Francisco Public Library, come on down. You're the next contestant on the price is right, we need four volunteers. Kyle, can we pick four volunteers? And hurry you guys, we only have 30 minutes for this. And we got four. I think we just need one more. Anyone else feeling brave?  Thank you. And then grab a whiteboard and a dryer race marker.  Okay, we got everybody with their whiteboards. Okay, so we're gonna start off with an easy one, okay? This is our practice round, Future of Libraries 2023. The retail cost of this program is $450. It contains one of the best values in library training in the Bay Area, offer six invaluable sessions here. Retail value 450. If you guys can do me a favor, you guys can write down how much the actual value is. Hurry, and audience, you guys are supposed to chime in. You're supposed to shout out, right? Have we all watched the prices right? I'm not hearing anything. I hear 600. Okay, we all put down a price.  Okay, we're still working. It's not that hard, you guys. Okay, okay. In three, two, one, you're gonna reveal to the audience. There you go. People said priceless, I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, great. Okay, now use your eraser. We're gonna start real, the real one. Get ready, you guys. And again, I want you guys to participate, right? This is a participatory session here, okay? And so yeah, you all paid about $30 to be here, so that's the actual price. That is the actual price. I should say we rounded up to the nearest dollar. Don't go over the amount, right? Okay, so the next one is the Bay Area Discovery Museum's Tri-Truck. It's an engineering lab on wheels, which brings hands-on steam programming to your library. Six interactive stations, great for families and kids, ages five plus. Retail cost $1,450. What is the retail, what is the actual cost? Audience, please. 26,000. To bring it to your library, you guys. Is everyone ready? Okay, three, two, one. Reveal. Okay, Kyle, who had the lowest value? I see someone said free, someone said 200 and 500. 500 wins. Oh, wait, no. Yep, 500 wins. What do they win, Kyle? Okay, you just went a round of applause. You win bragging rights. We told you guys this was reducing prices down, so you know our budget is zero here. Okay, next one, Kyle. All right, last one here. So at Mountain View Public Library, we hosted an author talk with New York Times bestselling author, Dennis Lahane, author of Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone. Several of his novels have been made into movies. How much do you think we paid? There was $10,000 retail. What do you think the library paid for this event? Our screen died, you're not supposed to see that yet. Oh, sorry, guys. Technical difficulties. Well, I saw someone said 7,000. I saw someone, spoiler, we got it for free. All right, so big round of applause for all of our volunteers here, thank you. Okay, so friends, why negotiate, right? What is the purpose of this? Thank you. Programming budgets are shrinking. I don't know about any of you guys, but every time I look at my budget, it keeps going down and down and down. Who has that happening right now? Yeah, feel bad for you guys. And also, there's a lot of less in-house programming because staffing is stretched. I know at Contra Costa, we're very, very stretched every day, and that's something, unfortunately, that a lot of you guys are feeling. And then hiring a performer or a speaker, it's less fun and work for all of you guys. Yeah, and also negotiating for a fair price. It also helps establish a fixed price or a ceiling for future events if you decide to hire that presenter again. Also, presenters continue to increase their honorariums with inflation, while, as Cheryl said, our program budgets are going down. So every dollar that you can save will give you more flexibility for the rest of the fiscal year, and it's gonna enable you to offer more robust programming for your community. Next up, we need to leverage our strength as libraries. For example, Contra Costa, we have 26 different locations. Obviously, we have the advantage of having multiple libraries and kind of that competitive advantage of negotiating down, especially if a performer is going to multiple different locations or a speaker is going to different locations. Also, sometimes you really get a discount when your performer or your speaker is very close to in proximity to your location, and then also the power of relationships, right? If you know somebody, it's also a lot easier to negotiate or you've had them at your library multiple, multiple times. You have already built that rapport with them, and so you can ask for a little bit of a discount, like, you know, sorry, you guys, my budget's really hurting this year. Is it possible, you love your performance at our library. Is it possible to negotiate that? Can we go a little bit down on that pricing? And also referrals, I think a lot of librarians do a lot of referrals, and so we get a lot of, hey, Kyle, I liked your performer, can we have them at our library? And then for my youth services librarians, obviously you guys know on-peak and off-peak pricing. Obviously, if you're gonna book somebody during summer reading, you know you're gonna pay really, really high costs, whereas if you book somebody, let's say, a magician, second week of January, you know you're gonna get a good deal because they're not gonna be booked as often. So, and I also, this is very controversial. I don't know, how many of you guys like to gamble? I like to go to Vegas a lot, and I like to gamble on people that have never been to any library, any speaker or any performer who has not performed before at any library, because you know why? I can get the best discount from them. I can actually get them for free because actually it could be used to build their portfolio, but I do have to mention that there are a lot of setbacks. I have crashed and burned on a lot of speakers where they looked very promising and just under delivered and were underwhelming. As my staff member at El Sobrante Library says, she goes, I go, how are you guys doing? She goes, we're vibing, we're vibing. So if you're vibing with the presenter, it's always a good thing because you can kind of talk to them and if you feel an intuition or you feel something, you know, you might wanna go with it. And again, Kyle, you said, think outside the box. Yeah, so it's important to think outside the box similar to what Cheryl is saying. Sometimes just because someone hasn't presented or doesn't typically present or perform at public libraries that shouldn't disqualify them. They might end up being an excellent fit for your library and you might be able to get them at a much cheaper cost than you would for your kind of typical go-to library performers. So for example, I was looking to book a performer who could appeal to single adults as well as families for our summer reading program and I stumbled across this really talented harvest from the Bay Area and on her website I saw that she performs music from the Legend of Zelda video games and this was right when the Tears of the Kingdom video game just came out and they're constantly selling out on the Switch or they're constantly being checked out from the Switch at our library. So it seemed like a perfect opportunity and I reached out, it was a really affordable rate and it ended up being the most successful program I've ever organized for an in-person event. It was like standing room only. So that just goes to show that sometimes thinking outside the box and looking for those people who aren't typically library performers can really be a good thing. How to negotiate, you guys. It's really easy. You could do it in three simple steps, okay? Here's step one. I think it's always good to look at performers at other libraries. I know you guys have done it. Don't be shy. I know you guys have looked at other libraries to see what other people have booked. We also wanna be cognizant of what other performers actually perform in that same category and how much do they charge. That's really important.  And so this is one. So I went to my favorite magician, Brian Scott, and look up there, I didn't even know why he quoted me on something but obviously this is from like umpteenth years ago. But this is a good place to start. Testimonials, because you can see that he listed the librarian, that bookdom or the school that booked him and you can always give them a ring, ring, ring and figure out how much did they pay for their performance because I'm gonna tell you every time I do that, a librarian's very forthcoming about like, oh I paid $400 for them or I paid $300.  Now this is the caveat. This one for goodness sake, Snakes. Snake, Wrangler in the Bay Area, South Bay Area. And he listed his pricing on the website. Now the problem is you're not gonna be able to negotiate that much because it's just like going to a restaurant you guys and ordering a main dish and that's $15, getting meatballs, that's $15. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna tell the waiter, oh yeah, by the way. Sorry, I don't have $15 to pay for that. Could I get it for $10? Don't know if that's necessarily gonna go over so well at a restaurant. So just be cognizant of a ring, ring, ring and figure out how much did they pay for their performance because I'm gonna tell you every time I do that, a librarian's very forthcoming about like, oh I paid $400 for them or I paid $300.  Now this is the caveat. This one for goodness, Snakes. Snake, Wrangler in the Bay Area, South Bay Area. And he listed his pricing on the website. Now the problem is you're not gonna be able to negotiate that much because it's just like going to a restaurant you guys and ordering a main dish and that's $15, getting meatballs that's $15. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna tell the waiter, oh yeah, by the way. Sorry, I don't have $15 to pay for that. Could I get it for $10? Don't know if that's necessarily gonna go over so well at a restaurant. So just be cognizant but you notice there's a range. So I would start off at the lowest portion of the range and then go back and forth like ping pong. Yeah, and so once you are reaching out to the performer, it's important then to decide are you gonna call them or are you gonna email them. I think there's advantages and disadvantages to both. I would say know what your strengths and weaknesses are and use the format that best certs your personality and your workflow. Personally, I really prefer reaching out over email. The advantage there is that you have a written account of everything that you said, everything that they said. Lessons of the chance of important details being forgotten or lost in translation, which can go both ways. If I'm on the phone with someone, I'm cradling the phone like this and I'm typing here, it's a much higher likelihood that I'll forget something and then that can just cause problems later down the road. But Cheryl, I know you personally like the phone call. I love phone calls. My staff knows, I love talking on the phone. That's like one of my things. Why? Because I want an answer immediately. I don't have time to wait for that email to come in to figure out how much they're gonna charge because I want to move on to the next person if they're not gonna meet my price point. And so that's why I always like phone calls. It's just faster for me if you can get the person there. If you're calling on the weekend, obviously, with any children's performer, you're gonna have issues reaching somebody. But if it's on the weekdays, in the morning, you're usually nine times out of 10 gonna reach that performer. Yeah, and I would say always ask for their price first. Don't put a number forward yourself. It's best to see what they're gonna offer and then you can go from there. And also just make sure you ask for everything that you need. So whether that's the forms to fill out, like hey, you're gonna need to fill out a W-9 at some point or let them know if they need to sign a liability waiver if it's an in-person program. Sometimes those things can be deal breakers with presenters, so it's best to just get all of that information out of the way as soon as possible. Because the last thing you wanna do is think you're confirmed for a program and then you find out a couple weeks later, they're like, oh, actually, I can't sign that form or I don't feel comfortable and that just totally throws off your whole programming schedule. And also, kindness and respect really go a really long way. Presenters and performers, they receive a ton of unsolicited calls, unsolicited emails from librarians and other organizations trying to book them. And one great way you can set yourself apart is just by being really friendly and showing your deference and respect to them. Just express how grateful you'd be, how grateful your organization would be to host them. Explain why your community would be a good audience for their presentation. For example, I work at Mountain View Public Library. So I always mention whenever I'm booking presenters who specialize in the science or technology fields, I mention how, hey, our library is right in the heart of Silicon Valley. We have a ton of highly educated patrons in our community and they have shown a proven interest in these topics. And lastly, pad their egos. It never hurts to pad their egos. Presenters and performers, they're all human just like any of us. And if you just express that say, hey, you have a really, we really love your expertise in this particular subject matter and they'll appreciate that. So it definitely makes a difference. I've found. Agreed. Now, I know you guys are thinking about this. What happens if they say no, Cheryl, to my price? Here's my thinking. There's plenty of magicians. There's plenty of jugglers. There's plenty of authors out there. I would try another performer or speaker in that category, honestly. But if you really have your heart set on this particular person or this particular author, this is what I would do. I would try the ice, ice, baby method. So I usually say, thanks for quoting me that price. I need to check with library administration because that's quite a lot over our budget right now. And but if you want, can you hold that day and time for me? And let me get back to you in a few days. Sometimes icing them out a little bit and giving that kind of span of time can also help because sometimes I've had it where the performer calls me back and then they think about it and they go, well, you know what? Maybe I am booking a performance as close to her library. So yeah, it would make sense for me to book her program. And even if it's at a discounted rate, it's fine. We've had that happen and it does happen. And sometimes two, three days later you call back and they say, hey, you know what? Yeah, but if not, you can basically confirm that price. And if that's where let's say it's $500 and let's say you were okay with that, just go ahead and book it. But just remember that that is the benchmark price so that if you try to book subsequent years or you want them to do a follow-up, it's gonna be at that price point or higher. And so what happens if you have a presenter or performer in mind that you think would be great for your library, but you know that they're probably gonna be way too expensive? Contact them anyway. The worst thing they can do is say no or just flat out ignore you. So just get over your fear of rejection and reach out. You have nothing to lose and potentially a lot to gain for your library and for your community. Also be upfront about your budget restrictions without giving a number. I always tend to include a kind of a disclaimer sentence in my initial email when I reach out to presenters. I'll say I will warn you that as a smaller library, public library system, we don't have a very large programming budget. However, we think you'd be an excellent fit and we'll do our utmost to accommodate your needs. By including that statement, it kind of lets them know from the get go that you probably won't be able to match what their typical fee is, but it also kind of softens the blow a bit when you do offer a specific number within your budget. Also, it's important to demonstrate flexibility in these scenarios. So maybe offer to do it virtually. Maybe offer rather than in person so they don't have to worry about travel costs and it's more convenient for them. Or you could offer to format the program as a more informal Q and A interview rather than a solo presentation. That's less work for them and the easier you can make it for them to say yes, the more likely they'll be able to say yes. And also just in my experience, high profile presenters and authors might be more willing to negotiate than cheaper or mid-tier presenters because they have a little more financial freedom and they might be more willing to agree to a discounted rate. So example one, Jim Butcher. So at Mountain View Public Library, I booked bestselling fantasy author, Jim Butcher. I made a point to be very kind and respectful in my message when I initially reached out. Similar to what I said earlier, I demonstrated why we would be so excited to host them, said, hey, I'm a huge fan. Our fellow librarians are big fans. Your books circulate so well at our library. We think you'd be an awesome fit. Also told him about our sci-fi September series of events that we host every year where we celebrate science fiction and fantasy and said, hey, you would be the perfect headliner for this series of events. And again, I offered to interview him rather than having him prepare a solo talk. And I included that disclaimer statement I mentioned earlier about the fact that we're a smaller public library system. We don't have a ton of money, but we'd love to try to meet his rate. And he ended up agreeing to do it for free. And it was a huge success. We had, I think over 100 people log into the Zoom session and the YouTube video now has like 11, 12,000 views on our YouTube page. Wow. And example two, we already mentioned that in the beginning part, but Dennis Lehain usually commands around 10,000, even for virtual talks. But for public libraries, I'm personally a huge fan of his work, so I've listened to interviews with what he's done in the past and I know he's a really outspoken advocate for public libraries. So I included that in my message and said, hey, that's so great that you're such a outspoken advocate for public libraries.  Your books circulate really well in our collection. And I offered to interview him instead of doing a prepared talk. And we did it virtually and he agreed to do it for free. And it was a wonderful event. So again, just because you think they're out of your league, you should still reach out anyway. Worst thing to do is say no. Okay, now here's the most important thing. Once you get that price together, you need to lock it in. So immediately, I would not wait to send this email. You need to take control of the email. Don't let the performer take control or the speaker take control. You're gonna email them. You're gonna tell them what price point you got to. And then it should include the price. It should include the date and the time and the location of where the performance is. Here's the key. What is included and what's not included? I have to say, I had one magician who likes to bring his little kid. Maybe you know this magician. I'm not paying for the kid, okay? I'm sorry, I have a real hard time with child slave labor. And I'm not paying for this kid. So I don't want the kid in your magic show, period. Or there was one that has a dog in their performance now. I'm like, I didn't book the dog. I booked you guys. So just make sure it's included and what's not included. Also let them know if you have performances before or afterwards so that they know what time they can set up and clean up as well. And method and payment schedule. I did have one story of a cultural performer who had gotten married. And so the check name that they gave me was their main name. And then they changed their name because they were married and I booked them like three months in advance. She comes back to me and she goes, oh yeah, by the way, I need a new check. Because you know why? I changed my name. I go, you know what? Too bad, lady. Sorry, I'm heartless. I was like, I'm sorry because it's gonna cost us 25 bucks or 50 bucks for a bounce check. So I gotta go get our friends to cancel the check and then I have to reissue that check. That's gonna cost some money. So just make sure you're very upfront about what you want, how you want it and how it's gonna be laid out. And Kyle, you said never sign any contracts? Yes, and just also building upon that payment method thing. Sometimes people really don't wanna have paper checks. I've had that issue with performers and presenters before where I've confirmed with them, think we're all good to go, and then I explained the fact that we're gonna pay them with a paper check and they say, oh no, no, can you do Zell? Can you do PayPal, whatever? And then if you can't accommodate that, then they dropped out. So it's important to just be clear about that from the get-go. And yeah, never sign any contracts. The city's attorney office for whatever organization you work for will not be happy with you. I remember you guys. Everything is? All right, we're on it. In case you need to reach us, you need Kyle's email template, you need my calling methods, you know where to find us. Thank you so much. Thank you. Do we have time for questions? Maybe like five minutes for questions. Anybody have any questions? You can also email us too. Oh yeah, that would be important, the mic. Our presentation was crystal clear. No, I'm sorry, there are questions. One challenge that we have is that our staff likes to over promise funding because they know we have it and so they try to like promise funds to people like, oh, the library can pay you $300 for that and then we have to kind of back them down off of that. Do you have any suggestions for how to wrangle in unruly staff? It's all about communication, right? Communication, communication, communication. You need to get to your staff and tell them, hey, you know what, no. And set that ceiling price for them before they actually start calling or start emailing, maybe you need to have a discussion with the staff and go, you know what, what are you thinking about booking? You know what, this is our ceiling for it. No more than this and make it like less than what your budget was and see if you can do it that way. If you need any more strategies, I got some more. I just wanted to know if those presentations that sci-fi author and also the other author are those available? Yeah, so the Jim Butcher author talk that we did for Mountain View Public Library that is on our Mountain View, so just go to YouTube, search Mountain View Public Library, Jim Butcher, it'll pop right up. The Dennis Lahane one, he actually did not let us record that event. So that was also one of his caveats. So that's also, you know, be flexible. Of course, I would prefer he would let us record it, but you know, the last thing you wanna do is to break something like that over not being able to record it. And we kind of build it as, oh, a special conversation, you know, and that was a way to kind of incentivize people to show up live for the Zoom talk. I was hoping, could you each speak briefly to how this intersects with your like DEIA focus at your libraries? Because that's something that gives me pauses. I wouldn't want to underpay somebody from our community. You know, even if we're working with a partner organization who's willing to do it for free, maybe they're worth more than that. And I wanna support this work in my community. So you can, can you speak to how that fits into your perspective? Sure, I'll take that. Yeah, go ahead and pay them, sure. If that's what you feel, if you feel they're worth it, go ahead. But I hate to tell you this, not everybody's budget is as plentiful as yours or mine or anybody else. You know, we're all working with different budgets, we're all working with different confines. But yeah, if you wanna go ahead and pay for the person because you think they're important, yeah, of course, pay for them. But this is for folks that maybe have dwindling budgets like myself and others. Yeah, and I was just gonna build on that and say that if it's something that I think is really important for the community, I always try to lobby my supervisor to say, hey, I think that this presenter we really should pay more, can we offer on the higher end? I know 600 is kind of like the max that we can typically offer for any particular event. So like for instance, we did one, it's like the neuroscience of implicit bias. And that was one where I really lobbied for us to go for a higher fee. Add on to that one. You know, and then also we may need to shift our paradigm a little bit. Having that person perform at your library may give them more exposure to other libraries and other locations where they can be booked at. So you know, you also have to think about it from both perspectives as well, exposure for both ends. I think we're good. And Rebecca, I think we're ready for a break. I'm always right behind you. Okay, yes, thank you everyone. We are gonna have our final break. Please do return. We have a couple of very exciting presentations coming up just to get you excited, responding to hate, lessons learned about LGBTQIA plus programming and policy enforcement through an equity lens. So two very important topics. So we hope to see you back here at 2.30.