We are going to deviate a little bit from our video series on ThinkScript, where I believe we are up to the part where we're going to look at the S&P 500 sectors and grid scripts as well as the last dividend script, and in the next video we're actually going to look at the breakout script, which is actually not in here. But I wanted to deviate a little bit because we are in the middle of, well, earning season and a lot of economic data at a very interesting junction. And I started thinking that maybe many of you see us chatting in the trade, in the channels on Discord, and we mention, we throw around terms that have to do with economic data and it actually affects your trading. It is something that, even though it is macro, it can affect you on the day-to-day or even swing trading, so it is very important to keep it in mind. So I put together this slide with three, six, nine of my, I'll actually throw in ten here just because earnings season. And actually, you know what, I'm going to throw this up here on, I'm going to go ahead and start out with that. So let's see if I can cover at least half of these in this video. So let's go ahead and actually we'll get started with earnings season. So I'm going to switch over here to Chrome and see if I can get a earnings calendar for this week. Right? So I'm just googling. There's a lot of places and you'll see them that they get thrown up on the Discord as well. Benzinga is one of them and earnings whisper is another one that you very surely have seen. I've never seen investing that, well that's a sponsored one, so it's an ad. MarketWatch has a calendar and of course you can get these on, there's some scripts that will do this on different platforms and they'll have their own lists and whatnot. But let me switch over to images and you'll see what I'm talking about. I'm sure you've seen this kind of a, this is 2019, this is August 14, I'm trying to find a recent one I guess. I'm not sure if I'm going to find one quickly enough. I don't want to overextend this video so let's just look at this one. This is the nearest one I saw or the earliest one I saw which was last week I believe, a couple of weeks ago. So four times a year companies report earnings and they're reported on a quarterly basis so four times a year. And it also, it makes sense because there's a lot of big macroeconomic data points which are also published four times a year on a quarterly basis such as GDP and stuff like that. So, well basically you know how this affects you if a company is doing well and they report good earnings theoretically it should be a positive tailwind for the company and inversely if it's not doing very well, if it reports bad earnings then it goes in the other direction. Now that doesn't always happen. There are other things, the two main numbers you will see for all of these quarterly reports as you would with earnings report is what the company reports its top line and bottom line were supposed to be or what analysts report the top and bottom line numbers are supposed to be. So the top line is the revenue, how much money they're making and the bottom line is, let me see if I can bring up, check out Yahoo Finance, see if we can see something for tomorrow. I usually check it on my mobile app and it will tell you which companies are coming up. Today is Wednesday, August 30th, so these are all the ones that reported today and then the ones that are reporting tomorrow, most of them will report either before the bell or after the bell. So, either after the market close or before the market close. Okay, let me see if I'll just move over, well this was for today, so I'm guessing I have to pick tomorrow. So tomorrow, Thursday, August 31st, you can see some of these report before the market open and some of them report after the market open, such as this one. So tomorrow we have, for example, Lululemon and there are two things you want to look at, as I mentioned, which is what this column is, the EPS, the earnings per share and that's the bottom line. The top line is usually reported as well, is always reported as well, but it is, like I said, it's revenue, it's how much money they actually made, well, how much they sold in products or services, whereas EPS is the profit, it's how much they made divided by the share, the number of shares outstanding. So we're talking about Lululemon, so they're expecting $2.54 cents per share and that will be tomorrow after the market close and after they report, there's another piece of information related to the earnings release, which is the earnings call, which is where the CFO or some other high executive will come on and say, well, this is how much money we made, this is why we made so little or why we made more, this is why we're expecting to make more and this is where they give their guidance, which is the next important piece of information, which even though you might have a met or even beat expectation for the EPS, stocks can sometimes dump after this and it's because they might guide load, which means, okay, this is what happened this quarter, you know, you expected or analysts expected $2.54 per share and we made it, you know, or we beat, you know, we made $2.56 per share, but you know what, next quarter looks really tough, you know, Q3, we're, you know, we're running into some stuff here, it's looking pretty bad and that is, is sometimes more than enough to make the stock tank, all right, and there's a lot of stuff that you can, you can research in here, you can go into the, the analysis and they'll usually have the analysts, which are covering them, how many of them are covering, which is obviously important, if it's a big enough company or a company with a lot of people, then they'll have a lot of analysts, as in this case, you know, 22 analysts covering it, and they will also have their targets, right, so they'll say, how many of them recommend buy or sell, as you can see here, a lot of them, you know, a lot of green here, so there's a lot of buy and a lot of hold as well, there's not that much sell, and they'll give you like, you know, the kind of the average rating, which in this case is a buy, and they'll give you targets, which is also important, and these are usually 12 months target, 12 months targets, right, so we're looking at within the next 12 months, the current price is 376, and the average analyst price target is for 20, and then you can calculate your, you know, you got basically 20 more bucks here, 20 more, that's 40 bucks, so that's about 12, 13%, something like that upside, and a lot of people will use that, okay, so that is what earnings will get you, basically, right, so you have to keep in mind, not just the revenue and the EPS, but also the guidance, that is important, and you will hear us talk a lot about, you know, and that's also as I covered in the investment strategy video, which I'm in the middle of doing a remake of it, by the way, what upgrades and downgrades have a lot to do with, right, if a company is having very good earnings, then they're going to be upgraded, if they, if a guidance call calls enough attention from the analysts, and then they go over and they work their numbers and they find out that that company indeed will have a very good quarter coming up, or a very bad quarter coming up, and those analysts will then, you know, basically go through the numbers and what they think the economy is going to do, and their market, their industry, and then basically say, okay, yeah, no, we're going to upgrade this because it looks good, or we're going to downgrade it, because we think it's not, you know, not going to do very well. So, when we talk about earnings season, we talk about revenue, revenue, yep, we talk about earnings or EPS, and we talk about guidance, right, because all of those can affect the market and not necessarily in the same way that, that you might, or not necessarily in the logical way that one might expect, okay, there's a lot of expectation built into what happened with EPS and the revenue, the reporting, and versus the one that's going to be guided towards in the next quarter, okay, so I'm just going to throw in upgrades and downgrades because that is indeed related, okay, so let's move on to the next one, CPI and PPI. So, CPI is basically, right, so inflation, so it's measuring the consumer price index is measuring what the price is paid by the consumer in, you know, a certain basket of goods and then they pick out the goods, it's not everything, it's the more important ones, the ones that represent the broadest part of the economy, and basically that tells you what inflation is, and that's what CPI refers to, refers to inflation, it's a measure of how much prices have inflated over the past quarter or year, depending on how you're measuring it. Now, this, you know, graph should make a lot of sense in 2020, prices, I guess, kind of dropped in the beginning and then they exploded, you know, because I don't know if you heard, but there was a lot of problems with supply chains because everything shut down, that included not just factories, but it also included transport companies, you know, ground transport as well as air and sea transport, and so prices basically, you know, started creeping up and climbing quite fast after the pandemic because, you know, it was hard to get goods from one place to the other, and then around 2021, they basically rocketed, as you can see, they doubled pretty much from previous levels and that had to do with the fact that now that a lot of companies had figured out how to ship goods and they had these, you know, COVID protocols in place, they were starting to do so, but then everybody had a lot of backlog and that, you know, created problems not to mention by 2022, there were still a lot of problems with shipping. Everything was still very expensive and then now, in 2023, after, you know, the pandemic reopening, you know, after everybody stopped being in lockdown, well now, prices have gone down and that is the uncertain territory that we are now basically navigating, but this is a very important measure of inflation and it's one of those economic data points that are reported and actually you'll see another one, which is also thrown around, which is the PCE and, you know, this is according to them, the Fed, the Federal Reserve, this is their preferred measure of inflation and this is just a graph denoting the difference of how the CPI, which is normally measured by the government, by the BEA, is composed by these percentages out of food, housing, transportation, medical care, recreation and other goods and services, which seems to be a lot more leaning a lot more towards housing, as you can clearly see, 42 percent and the PCE is a little bit more, you know, equal in distribution, as you can clearly see from that graph. So CPI obviously is important. There's also the other side, which is PPI, which is the prices paid by the producers and eventually if PPI, you know, jumps up, then some of those, you know, price increases or some of that inflation will creep up and eventually make it down towards the CPI because obviously if, you know, for example, a lot of transport went up, you know, it exploded, the CPI, the PPI for transport exploded during the 20s and 21s, right? Then obviously that's going to make it down to the consumer because if, you know, the producers are having to pay more to transport their goods, then they're going to at some point pass on that increase to the consumer. So, all right, that is basically CPI and PPI. So, and the thing here is, again, these are either monthly or yearly reports, right? And you will see things like month over month, or year over year, oops, year over year, okay? Oh, and of course, quarter over quarter. So, you have to keep an eye out for those. Sometimes you'll see, you know, things like if you see 0.2, 0.3 percent, that's more than likely the month over month. When you see something like 3 percent or 4 percent, that's probably the year over year. So, just keep that in mind. All right, so let's jump over to retail sales. You see here, get this out of the way. Retail sales, obviously, have to do with how much people are shopping. One of these things, one of the things that's very important to keep in mind is that the U.S. economy is consumer driven, okay? It is based very strongly on spending and however much the consumer spends has a lot of big effect over the U.S. economy. So, which is different, for example, from the Chinese economy, which is more manufacturer based. Okay, so again, this chart should make sense. You know, we had a huge retail sales explosion during the pandemic, you know, after 2020 and 2021, this had a lot to do with the fact that people were shopping online. You remember, everybody started buying like a, you know, office equipment for their houses and they started buying or stocking up on food and a lot of other home supplies and that had a lot to do with the explosion that you can clearly see here from the 20 to the 21. And then in 22, this unfortunately doesn't have 23, but in the 22, it dropped off because basically we had to come back to normal levels, right? So, 2021 was obviously a pandemic effect. Okay, you can see it's more than double. But then it came back down to more normal levels. And this is again something that is reported. And if you're trading stocks such as Target or Walmart, right, or Etsy or Wish, I don't know, all the other Costco, the dollar stores, all those, you know, companies, Kroger, well, sorry, was it not Kroger, Kohl's Home Depot, those are all retailers and they have, they have their ups and downs for different reasons, right? For example, to give you an example, I remember that a lot of people talk about Lowe's and Home Depot whenever hurricane season comes around, right?  And that has a lot to do with U.S. retail sales. So these are also reported quite often and they should also be monitored in case you are trading retail stocks, right? So we're going to just leave retail sales there and we're just going to drop some tickers, right? Which have to do with retail. Okay, consumer sentiment. Again, this is related to retail sales, consumer sentiment or consumer confidence is affected by different expectations of what the, you know, what the economy is like if you have an economy that's looking kind of sluggish, right? As you as happened in 2020, then consumer sentiment drops because consumers say, oh, no, we're not going to, you know, we're not going to be spending as much as we usually would as you could clearly see this was on an uptrend and then in 2020 with the pandemic it dropped because everybody got scared they didn't know what was going to happen. So of course you stop spending. You're is number one. So obviously retail sales are affected. But you also there are certain things that are affected by an event such as a pandemic or a lockdown because you won't stop buying food and medicines, which is probably more of what the kind of stuff that Walmart and Target sell. So you would expect retail sales to go up. But you definitely definitely don't feel good about the economy and your sentiment as a consumer, you know, drops a lot because you don't know what's happening in the economy. You don't know what's going to happen in the future. You're definitely not going to start making purchases like houses and cars and, you know, things like that because there are certain things that are considered discretionary goods, right? There's the luxury goods or discretionary goods and then there's the consumer staples that you always buy, right? So that is another indicator that gets thrown around and it's usually reported by Michigan, the Michigan consumer sentiment report. It's called I'll I have a list of all of these in a little bit. OK, and since we do have time for probably one more one, two, three, four, we've been through four. Let's do five GDP. And this is one of the heavy weight, one of the more important ones. This is a chart of GDP. This is GDP in actual dollar values, right? In trillions of dollars and you can clearly see how it drops off in 2020. And then it peaked back up and now it's just kind of settling back down after having recovered. You'll see it reported in dollar terms and you will also see it reported in. Let me see. This is an incomplete chart that again is in dollars, but sometimes you'll see it reported as percentages because they're actually talking about the percentage growth such as now this is income and spending. Here we go. Here's a chart. So sometimes you'll see it.  So it was negative three years, so percent. In 2021, it exploded back up, as we remember, and that it crept up to six percent. And this is year over year. So this is how much it grew from 20 to 2021. It grew six percent. And then from 2021 to 2022, it only grew two percent and so on. And this is the kind of data which is also reported on a quarterly basis. OK, and they review it. They also review it. Now, there's something that's really important about this, which I wanted to mention, which is there's GDP, right? And that's usually trillions of dollars, right? Or figures such as, you know, I don't know, a nominal GDP growth on year over year is probably like five percent, right? That's two year over year. Or you could do quarter to quarter. That's usually around, say, zero point eight percent. I could do like two percent, one point five percent. I believe that's what it is around right now. And but then there's also a GDP now, OK, which is a data point, which is not always reported. But if you do run into it, it's important to know. And GDP now is actually it's not called a forecast. It's called a now cast. And and what it is, it's basically a GDP value that they calculate, I believe, is on a daily basis. And and it is available, but it is not complete. It hasn't it doesn't factor in certain things such as, you know, big events, big macroeconomic events like geopolitical situations or pandemics or strikes or things like that. It's basically a up to date production data of a certain group of companies that are included in this in this calculation or model. It is a forecast model and we could Google it or find it on Wikipedia and see what it is. But it is sometimes used to forecast GDP ahead of time. OK, so those are all that's like the top five. Now, it's not the top five. It's five of the 10. OK, because we will definitely cover these other ones. I'll split it up into another video so it's not so long. But these are some of the more important economic indicators that you will find that are important to keep an eye on. And this is a trading economics dot com calendar, which is we used it to actually come in here. There's a lot of things that you can find in here that are reported. And as you can see, you can pick your dates, right? And you can filter by countries as well. If we just do U.S., for example, that's too many. You know, I'm just because I do keep an eye on a lot of these other ones. But if you're only, you know, trading in the U.S. although, you know, with the global economy, the way it is, the global economy is so interconnected that you can't just really keep track of one. At least the most important partners. So U.S., Mexico, Canada, but, well, China. But for example, this is telling us that for Wednesday, August 30th, and you can see the little U.S. flag here starting at 5 a.m., you get the mortgage rate and mortgage applications, which are very important. OK. And then you get, later on at 6.30 a.m., you get GDP growth rate. So this is quarter on quarter for the second, this is the second estimate, which I believe is for the previous quarter, which was Q2. So they revise it. They put out the GDP, obviously, after the quarter closes, and then they make a revision. And I believe they even make up to a third revision if I'm not mistaken. So this is going to be the second revision for Q2. As you can see here again, you know, this actual was 2.1 and the previous, that was a previous, but the consensus was 2.4 and it came in at 2.1, right? I do believe this has been revised down. So this was, oh yeah, this was revised down. This was actually today. This was actually today. OK. You get retail inventories without autos. You get, you know, a lot of stuff here. The, I believe the PCE is here as well. PCE prices, that's going to be, that was reported. Let me see here. Let me make sure this is Wednesday. Yep, Wednesday. OK. The core PCE, the real consumer spending, GDP sales. You get oil stocks, inventories as well. And then you can just go through the list and go through the day. So here's Thursday. Here's tomorrow. So tomorrow we get, let's see here, tomorrow we get personal income and spending. You get the core PCE. You get jobless claims, which is one of the ones that we'll look at in the next video. And then you keep going down the list, right? And then Friday. So I'm not going to go through all of these, but basically if you are trading a stock during a particular week and you see one of these, you know, economic data points being, oh, it's calendarized and it's set to be reported during this week, then you better be careful what it is you're trading because, you know, you could run into a nasty unexpected surprise. And that's something that you want to stay clear depending on what you are trading because, you know, basically, or because face it, nobody knows what's really going to happen. So if you're trading with these kinds of events, which have a lot to do with volatility, by the way, especially if you're trading options, then you want to be careful because the increase in volatility, you know, if you didn't plan for it, then it's definitely going to go against you and the drop in volatility after the report as well. So I just wanted to cover some of those basic terms and I will continue with these in the next video. We'll look at jobless claims or basically the labor market. We'll look at the dollar and the yields and oil as well as mortgage apps. So I hope you found this interesting and if you have anything that you would want me to cover specifically, you know, how different economic data points affect the markets, then go ahead and drop comments in the comment section and remember to subscribe to our channel and click on the bell to stay notified of new videos that are posted on a weekly basis. And don't forget to use my invite link to sign up for an Xtrades membership plan, you know, and I'll see you guys in the next video. Have a great one.


I don't know what you're saying, but she said you're putting new comments on it, so give us a little description. Well basically right, we're like a pit of some metal and some jazz and some gospel, and uh, and like, a healthy monk. But yeah, we're definitely the idea of those things. Shocking. If like, if uh, if you could, yeah. Or give away to the subscribers. If you take Kings of Leon. Okay. And the healthy monkeys. Yeah. And Buzzo's bands really fancy each other. Okay. And they played a few gigs, they met, they got each other's numbers. Yeah. And then the Kings of Leon took the healthy monkeys back with some hot coffee. Um, and they, they got down to the nitty gritty and they had a baby. That's kind of me. Would be the carnival. Yes. There we go. I don't think you could sum that up better, to be honest. So you're in Ireland now. I want to hear your best Irish accent. Oh no. There's three of us. No, there's three of us. No, no, no, no. There's three of us. Three of us? Three of us. No. Three of us, no. No? Three. Three.    And I see, he makes his fatter.    I didn't have to say the rest of the show. You can beat them out. It's too bad. Yeah, I don't know. We ought to try our best. So have you got anything of a common in Ireland in the near future? Not that we know of at the moment. So what we did, we came, we were here in May. And then we came back, we did, we played Maynuth. Maynuth? Maynuth, uni last night. Maynuth. We did a little bit on RTE too. We did Wheelins the last time we came here. Yeah. And the Mercantiles. And the Mercantiles. I think half of that is Wheelins. I think it's an Irish crowd better than the English crowd. Yes. Yes and no. I think so. I think the Irish are great. The Irish are great. They're all up for a lot. They're all up for a gig. They're all up for a crack. They're up for a crack. They're up for a crack. Spells. C-R-A-I-C. Yes. Yeah, I'm pretty good at the Irish stuff. We like to kind of get some research from our audiences. So, we know what we're going to do. Like I actually enjoyed it. Pog Mahon. Do you know what I mean? Shit, that's the rude one. What was the other one? Hannah. Hannah took Kurt Kurt. I don't think that's my Irish. Sorry? I don't think that's my Irish. That's not my Irish. Just say Judith. Judith. Judith. Judith. No, it's extremely rude. Judith. Judith. Hello. Judith. And how did you find me tonight? Wonderful. Great fun. A bit hot, a bit sweaty, great atmosphere. Really nice. You can hear all everything. Thank you.


And thanks to the organizers for inviting me here to speak today after this excellent lineup of, as I mentioned before, SITC All-Stars, it's a little intimidating to talk after people who have such positive data since so much of what I've done in this area has been somewhat less positive, let's just say that. Also these folks are true All-Stars. I'm at best a SITC member and I'm not sure my membership is up to date so I have to work on that. We'll check on you. Yes. Okay, good. So I've heard a lot about PD1 and PDL1. I thought I'd focus a little bit on biomarker development in that area as opposed to talking about some of the past. Just as a quick summary of where I think we stand right now is we have an early signal of efficacy based on just phase one trials at the moment. One of the key questions with the data that we've seen is, is the clinical benefit that we've seen in some ways a reflection of patient selection or will the stable disease that we've seen in some of these patients translate into improved survival and pivotal trials? That certainly was the case as Pam mentioned with epilimumab. We'll have to see if that's the case with PD1 and PDL1. And also very important, as she mentioned as well, is how many of these responses are durable when we stop therapy? We talk about the tail of the curve which is what we all care so much about. Those folks who actually enter a remission and come off treatment, are those responses as durable with PD1, PDL1 as we see with IL2 and IPI. Toxicity is an issue particularly when you talk about combinations which is obviously the next step. But what I was asked to focus on is biomarker development and one fundamental question is are we ready to guide clinical development or pivotal trials based on biomarkers, particularly PDL1 expression which has received some attention early on in the development of these drugs. That was largely based on the Topolian New England Journal study that was published a while back where we looked at a small, relatively small subset of patients on that trial looking at tumor, immunohistochemical expression of PDL1 on the tumor. Essentially in that experience if there was not PDL1 picked up on the tumor, there were no responses in that group. But it must be emphasized a very small group of patients, only 42 patients. Also a very small group of kidney cancer patients. So we obviously need more data. One of the interesting things in my mind about ASCO this year was we started to get some more data about the impact of PDL1 expression on response. This is data from Genentech and their phase one trial of their PDL1 antibody looking at PDL1 staining on the infiltrating cells in the tumor. And what you see here is essentially while responses seem to be higher in PDL1 positive tumors. We're still seeing responses in PDL1 negative tumors. So in my opinion, we need a lot more work in this area. We also, I don't think we're ready to exclude patients who are PDL1 negative particularly in kidney cancer for reasons that I'll explain. So here's some of summary data that we've seen so far. I mentioned the PD1 and PDL1 data. There was also another smaller study, smaller analysis of the melanoma patients on the original pivotal trial looking at 34 patients in that setting. Interestingly, those that were PDL1 positive were the response rate was higher than we saw on the overall population. But once again, slightly in a different tumor type, responses being seen in PDL1 negative patients. And we'll talk about the combination in a second. So there's quite a few unanswered questions. I'll try to take just a few of them as far as the biomarker development, translational questions which we hope we can address in the coming years. The first one that I decided to pick out is PDL1 expression uniform and stable in an individual tumor and from primary to metastases. We've all, this has been cited multiple times at almost every meeting. We cite the British group's work from Girlinger et al. from New England Journal about tumor heterogeneity. My opinion this is going to have a large impact on biomarker development with these targeted immune therapies. Gordon already showed this slide. I'll make a slightly different point than he made with looking at, this is Sabina Senioretti's lab looking at his PDL1 IHC antibody, looking at concordance in some patients between primary and metastases, but discordance in other cases. We've started to look at a group of primary and matched met pairs. These are not biopsies samples. These are surgical excisions on patients. We obviously have to do this in a much larger group of patients and we're glad to collaborate with folks who can provide samples. But we've looked at in those 34 patients, we had 10 patients who were PDL1 positive by their assay, but in seven out of 10 of those patients, the met was positive and three, it was negative. Also we saw some patients where the primary was negative and the met was positive. So there may be some discordance in patients. Recently she found that in the primary, PDL1 staining was quite heterogeneous. It tended to be in areas of high nuclear grade, but in the met, the staining was more homogeneous. So how does this impact biomarker development? It's possible in our early experiments we need to be sampling both the primary and the metastases and I would argue that we need to consider all these trials are hard to execute, trying to get excisional tissues so we can see a more comprehensive view of what the tumor is doing. Another question is what factors, in addition to PDL1, the expression can reliably predict response to treatment. So for example, why do some PDL1 negative patients actually respond to a PD1 antibody? I think Gordon mentioned this as well and it may be as simple potentially as PDL2. And Sabina has shown in the case example of one patient's tumor in the bottom here that does not have PDL1 on its surface, but does express PDL2. So could that be a possible explanation for why PDL1 patients don't respond, are they just expressing PDL2, that needs to be explored, this antibody needs to be refined and tested in much larger groups of patients. Another unanswered question is predictive marker expression influenced by prior VEGF therapy. I think it's an interesting question and does it predict for a response to this therapy? So for example, are VEGF therapies which are so common, more active in PDL1 positive patients? I sort of alluded to the IL2 select trial that we mentioned before as a sort of a negative experience in biomarker development and immune therapy and kidney cancer. Here's a look at the same cohort of patients we looked briefly at whether PDL1 expression and B7H3 expression, this was the help with Eugene Kwan and Brad Liebowicz at the Mayo Clinic. And essentially in our hands, PDL1, when it was up in your tumor, B7H3 is up in your tumor, you are more likely to respond to IL2. Obviously that needs to be confirmed in a prospective data set, but more important to the point that I was trying to make, most of these patients did not get cured with IL2, surprisingly, but they went on to other therapies. And one of the things we tried to look at is whether staining impacted their response to those other therapies, and it turns out that group was probably a little bit less likely to benefit from VEGF TKI's, other groups have published similar results in this area. GSK presented a trial at ASCO, which I would have shown you as the next slide, except Dr. Schweri forgot to give it to me, unfortunately. But it shows a similar experience. Thank you, Dr. Schweri. All right, moving on, so he's busy. So PD1 blockade, another question which I'd like to see us pursue is PD1 blockade better applied in the treatment naive setting or in the VEGF pathway resistant setting. One trial that Mike Atkins is trying to launch is trying to get at some of these questions, try to help address some of these issues, both clinical and translational. This is a phase two trial where patients would get their primary tumor sampled, they'd also get a baseline tumor biopsy of a metastasis that would be excisional, they'd be then randomized to VEGF TKI or a PD1 antibody, and then at the time of progression undergo a second excisional biopsy in the case of the VEGF TKI patients, they probably could be biopsied because that would then allow them to go on to get the PD1 antibody which patients are obviously highly motivated to get. This trial, this type of trial design is hard to execute, but I think given the interest in PD1 antibodies at the moment, it might be possible, it might help address some of these issues not just on predictive biomarkers and the impact of VEGF therapy on those biomarkers, but some of the mechanistic questions that have been alluded to about why some of these agents work and why they may not work in some patients. Last question that I had here is, what are some of the mechanisms of resistance? Obviously, just like with IL2 and epilimumab, the patients getting a long benefit with PD1, PDL1 or obviously just a subset of the entire group, why is that? How can we look at both innate and acquired resistance to PD1 pathway blockade? There are quite a few potential mechanisms of innate resistance. This is sort of a long list. I won't go over it all because it's just I don't have too much time, but I'd like to focus on one of the potential mechanisms for innate resistance. Could it be that in tumors where exhausted T cells or inhibitory T cells predominate that approaches to activate T cells like IL2 or target inhibitory molecules like Tim3 and lag3 as you've heard from other speakers or deplete regulatory T cells as epilimumab might do, could those things be necessary in those patients to overcome innate resistance? This is a look, once again, from Sabina Senuretti, looking at co-expression of T cell inhibitory pathways in kidney cancer specimens. This is looking at T cells. Essentially what this shows is T cells in the tumor both expressing PD1, Tim3, at the same time, so it's conceivable that you need to be blocking both of these antibodies, both of these targets, or other targets as other people have mentioned, to get a full response. So we do see this in some specimens. Genentech has made a great effort at trying to look at some of these mechanistic questions in their recent Phase 1 trial that I mentioned before, where patients with access to tissue were asked to undergo serial biopsies. This is looking at a serial biopsy of a kidney cancer patient. Unfortunately, many of our patients don't have easily biopsiable disease, but this person obviously did with a mass under their arm. You can see the response happening fairly quickly, but also probably more interesting is you can see some changes, which are characteristic of a responding patient with T cell CD8-positive infiltrate in this specimen sample taken at the second biopsy. Obviously, coming up with situations where we can do that effectively in kidney cancer is going to be harder than it is, say, in melanoma, but another potential place where we could test it is in the neo-adjuvant setting, as Chuck mentioned, and I think as Naomi Haas mentioned earlier this morning, and that's something we're trying to develop in the cooperative group setting, looking at a neo-adjuvant application of PD1 blockade. So this has been mentioned several times. I won't belabor this, because this is the recent New England Journal paper of looking at combinations. The point is not that this is the greatest data since oncology started, because it is. But more importantly, the biomarker part of this story, we saw increased responses than with single-agent PD1. We saw increased toxicity, as been pointed out by at least one speaker. But I wanted to focus a little bit on the biomarker piece of this story. As I mentioned to you before, PDL1 expression has been associated with higher response rates, but it's not perfect at excluding non-responders. One of the interesting pieces of this trial was that the response rate in PDL1 negative and PDL1 positive patients was robust in both groups, and that begs the question which maybe we can address with the speakers here is, you know, what's going on there? In a PDL1 negative patient, what is CTLA 4 blockade doing to that tumor microenvironment that are making those patients responders? That was an exciting application in my mind of biomarker development that hopefully will lead to future insights. So as we move forward, you know, there's a lot of exciting new things to do, as many people have said. It's great that people are showing interest in immune therapy, and I certainly hope it continues. A lot of different combinations that make sense, but only with rational trial design and biomarker development are we going to be able to move this path forward, particularly when we have active agents in the clinic when you think about clinical development. So we're going to have to narrow our population, narrow our application of these agents to the proper patient in order to move these combinations forward, in my opinion, so that we can achieve Dr. Finke's dream of more cures for kidney cancer with targeted immunotherapy. Thank you very much for your attention.


In the Dhyanlika, the swamis take care from Pardami to Amavasya and the mahas from Amavasya to Pardami. So what is the reason for this and what is the difference in the quality of these two parts of the moon and month? Waxing and waning, that's what is happening. In one, the influence of the moon is receding. In another, the influence of the moon is rising.  You know the sun because it's burning. In a way, in our experience, it's a product of the sun. Not only in our experience, some scientific theories say, it is the solar material which flew out in the spin and became all these planets and satellites and whatever. One small blob became a moon. For human understanding, we are always looking at everything to give it a polarity because all physical substance has polarity leanings. Actually in India, certain trees are identified as male trees. Certain trees are identified as female trees. Have you seen in the villages two trees are married? In the villages, young girls go and worship these trees when they want to get married. Two trees get married. Entire village attends the wedding. People saw, this is a masculine tree, this is a feminine tree because of certain types of inclinations in the tree. So similarly, when they looked at the sun, they saw him as masculine, they saw the moon as feminine. This is not some rural mind's mishap. This is a reality. If they were wrong, the female body wouldn't be in sync with the cycles of the moon. The moon in many ways represents the feminine. If you are male, the problem with you is you're looking towards the female. If you are female, the problem with you, you're looking towards the male because in some way it's not there in you. If you are male, we want the feminine to rise within you. If you are female, we want the masculine to rise within you. This is not to distort nature, but to even out nature. We call Adiyogi Shiva the ultimate man, not because he is super macho, he is. But because one half of him is woman. That's why he is the ultimate man. So the effort is to make you into that ultimate piece of human being who carries masculine and feminine in equal proportions within you. And you are able to conduct life in a very balanced way because these two things are equally there within you. If you're masculine, you don't have the feminine. If you're feminine, you don't have the masculine. In how many ways human beings are suffering because of this absence. So the idea of creating that in the Dhyanalinga temple is not just for those periods, it's established like that. That if you are there in its presence slowly, you will see after some time, you are quite fine. If you look at a woman, you can simply look at her like you look at everything else in the world, which you did when you were a child. The moment you got chemically poisoned, you lost that ability to simply look at another human being as human being. Every small bump in the body became some great world by itself. Every little something became so big simply because you distorted. So to settle that distortion, because it's such a powerful energy field if it becomes too masculine or too feminine, then it will take people in a different way. Taking people like that into excessively masculine or excessively feminine nature could be useful to do certain type of work, but not useful to live.  Dhyanalinga is for all. All processes that happen there are wide open because of that. It's managed like this. Many of them these days I think they're going into Lingarpanam maybe once in three, four, five years I think. I have read a lot of hundreds of sharings of how they felt. Hundreds and hundreds of experiences which made them feel something that would have never happened to them anywhere else. What happened to them was on one level, the masculine and the feminine within you got evened out. It's equal. If the masculine and feminine is in equal proportion, then only both will dare to be full-fledged.   People need accessories when they're not full-fledged. You never looked at a man who's walking on crutches and envied him, oh he's got four legs, I got only two. If he had golden crutches maybe you would. So it evens you out so that this is full-fledged. When this is full-fledged, you don't care what somebody has because being alive is better than anything else.


This is Stink Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Bingo! It's Wednesday. Well, that means energy day, okay? Hawaii, the state of clean energy. Richard Wallsgrove joins us tonight. He's a professor at UH Law School, William S. Richardson Law School, and we have a bunch of students. Hi, Richard. Thanks for coming down. Thanks for having me, Jay. He's a co-host. And, Glenn Morioka, who is the transportation guy at Hawaiian Electric. That's not your real title. Let's try to give a real title here. It's General Manager of Electrification of Transportation at Hawaiian Electric. EOT for short, yeah. EOT. We'll call you the EOT. Very good. Okay. And this is our visiting piece of news, press release news, and after an embargo, this came out, what, yesterday or today? Last Thursday, March 29th. Last Thursday? Oh, I know. And it's called... Because that's been the target for the last nine months. Okay. And it's called... The article, anyway, is called Broad Economic Environmental Benefits Described in Electrification of Transportation Roadmap. So, Brennan, tell us about the roadmap. Well, so the electrification of transportation strategic roadmap was in the works for a number of years. It had never really been put to paper, and so PC had requested us to actually file something formally, put down what Hawaiian Electric thinks its role is in the electrification of transportation, and what some of the initiatives that we would like to be putting forward. And so it's a very thoughtful, very consuming document, but what I'm most proud of is it's a very collaborative document. We had a number of workshops with stakeholders, individual meetings with smaller groups and individual groups really to get their feedback because it needed to be something that our community, our energy and transportation community was bought into going forward because it's not just something Hawaiian Electric or the utility can do on its own. It really needs a number of partners to be pushing various aspects forward. And what was also nice to see was that it was a marriage or building relationships of organizations in the energy sector and combining that with organizations in the transportation sector, which doesn't necessarily have an immediate or direct tie, but with electrification of transportation, there are a lot of agencies, transportation industry sectors that really must buy in and understand some of the energy aspects of their business. And so Hawaiian Electric and our companies want to play that role of a facilitator, be there to help educate people, be a liaison or be that trusted advisor that we can help answer questions for people or businesses that want to make the move, which we believe is a necessary move. And one of the things that are the EOT roadmap is really meant to do is really three things. One is help assist in the state's efforts to achieve 100% RPS, you know, I think without electrification, well, just RPS and the initial 100% RPS goal, the original 100% correct. You know, others have now thrown on this clean transportation initiatives as well, which I think is very much a part of us getting to that 100% overall RPS. I think without EOT, we can still achieve it, but it becomes far harder for us as a community to do with EOT. There's a lot, a lot more avenues that we can now take advantage of that wasn't necessarily available to us before, especially with some of the innovative technologies coming on. But also electrifying our transportation, you know, and it's not just electric vehicles, it's electric buses, it's electric cranes at the harbors, it's electric ground service equipment at the airports, so it's really transportation industry as a whole. If we can move toward that and get off of the dependency on fossil fuels, we end up with a cleaner environment, we have more energy security because we now don't need to import and rely on all the petroleum that has to come from someplace else. We kind of control much more of our own destiny. And then all of that in turn, if we do it right and we partner right and everything kind of falls in place, we can see overall savings for all of our customers, not just those who own an electric vehicle, but all of our utility customers across the board, they would see some form of benefits or value by electrification of transportation. So what's the status of this road map right now? Is it approved and ready to go and actually being implemented or you have to go through some process yet? Well, we just followed it with the PUC on the 29th of March and so now the process is still kind of undetermined. They did not ask us to submit it for approval, it was more for information, but once they read through it, there may be a decision to create a docket of its own or create, have further discussion. And so we're also planning on having a meeting in advance with the PUC, the State Energy Office, Consumer Advocates Office, just to kind of answer whatever questions that they might have. So you want to get broad-based acceptance? Absolutely. So we do tend to try and be as proactive as we can in trying to answer whatever questions people might have. And so that's our next step, I think in a couple of weeks we're meeting with them and hopefully that's going to be a very fruitful dialogue. We've included a number of parties including those three along the way through the entire development of the roadmap. So hopefully there were no surprises for them and we've shared all of our ideas along the way. So hopefully it's just a matter of moving forward. We do plan on starting some of the initiatives that we outline in the roadmap very soon. And so we intend to have to have a lot more dialogue. We had a lot before but it's just going to continue and grow. I take it that when you say initiatives, they're incentive programs to incentivize changing of community and business conduct in order to adopt electric vehicles and electrification of transportation more than they might otherwise have done. So what kind of incentives, what kind of incentive initiatives are we talking about? And incentives is just one aspect. There are other programs that we do think are necessary in order to achieve some of the goals that we want including public education and outreach. That I think is going to be probably the key piece to a successful roadmap implementation. But in terms of some of the incentives, one of the biggest barriers for someone to choose to buy an electric vehicle right now is that upfront cost. Right now electric vehicles are a little bit more expensive just because of the cost of the battery. As battery prices decrease, the cost of the cars will come down as well. And people believe by 2025 you have cost parity. An electric vehicle in the same type of model will cost about the same as a regular gasoline car. Are you going to go for a resumption of state credits on this? So tax credits, so the federal tax credit which is currently in place is a big incentive that is already out there. There's talk about whether or not we can incentivize state tax credits. We had some in the past. Can we do some again in the future that would help in this interim until we hit 2025 in cost parity? But also working, Hoan Electric, working with some of our car manufacturer and dealerships. Last year we were very successful in working with Nissan in offering a $10,000 rebate. Right off the top of the bat you get a $10,000 cost reduction of the Nissan Leaf. To the point where by November Nissan started running out of Leafs here in Hawaii and they couldn't get enough inventory. So people weren't actually able to take full advantage. That's the kind of program I'm talking about. But we're also working with them right now. So Nissan is until June 30th they're going to be offering a $3,000 rebate on the 2018 Leaf. So it's not the same as the $10,000 that you got last year, but $3,000 is still a significant amount when you're trying to make a decision on buying a car. Brandon, I want to offer Richard the opportunity to ask you a question just to keep this flowing between us. We only have a minute left. Yeah. I'm excited by the roadmap. I think one of the things that really excites me the most is this idea that there's savings for everybody. And what Brandon didn't say is those savings get even bigger if we just incentivize simple behaviors. Biggest example is if we can get folks to charge these cards in the middle of the day, say you show up at work and you plug your car in at work, then the savings grow by a factor of two or something like that. Two or three in certain aspects, yeah. So what do you think is the key to getting that sort of driving on sunshine concept going? The first one is obviously providing the infrastructure. So we've already started meeting with developers, business owners, employers, trying to explain the benefits of workplace charging for their employees as an employee benefit, but also as a greater participation in trying to provide a cleaner environment, cost savings in the future. And so that's the kind of conversation and the public education aspect that I talked about that needs to continue, that we'll be doing in the interim, and hopefully we'll see further support and partnership with many of our other stakeholders moving forward. Thank you, Brandon. Thanks for coming down. Appreciate it any time. Continue down the road with you. If you want to hear more about it as it rolls out. Absolutely. Aloha. We'll take a short break. We'll be right back after this break. I'm going to talk to Richard's friends, lots of them. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness.  For me, there's got to be solutions, how to make a brighter day. I'm Ethan Allen, host of Likeable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., I hope you'll join me for Likeable Science, where we'll dig into science, dig into the meat of science, dig into the joy and delight of science. We'll discover why science is indeed fun, why science is interesting, why people should care about science, and care about the research that's being done out there. It's all great, it's all entertaining, it's all educational, so I hope you'll join me for Likeable Science. Hello everyone, Ted Ralston here, a host of our Think Tech show, Where the Drone Leads, where we talk weekly at Thursdays and Noon, by the way, on subjects related to emerging technology and business of drones, as they might apply here in Hawaii. Issues involving commerce, education, legislation, technology, public safety, all the things that you might want to hear about. We talk about them with local experts and people from across the country. So join us at Noon on every Thursday, and we'll have a new subject, and we'll have new faces to talk about this most interesting subject area. Hello, I'm Helen Dora Hayden, the host of Voice of the Veteran, seen here live every Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. on Think Tech, Hawaii. As a fellow veteran and veteran's advocate with over 23 years experience serving veterans, active duty, and family members, I hope to educate everyone on benefits and accessibility services by inviting professionals in the field to appear on the show. In addition, I hope to plan on inviting guest veterans to talk about their concerns and possibly offer solutions. As we navigate and work together through issues, we can all benefit. Please join me every Thursday at 1 p.m. for the Voice of the Veteran. Aloha. Okay, we're back. We're live. We're here in Hawaii, the state of clean energy and Think Tech on Wednesday. It's our flagship energy show, Richard Wildsgrohe, Professor Richard Wildsgrohe, William S. Richards, and School of Law is my co-host, and he has invited some of his students down. We're going to talk to them now. So Richard, can you please introduce them and let's talk about the scope of this discussion to follow? I would love to, and thanks for allowing us to come in today, Jay. So we have Magdalena. She's been, she's actually a post-graduate student at the law school. She's been working on what's called a law thesis, right? So it's sort of like a PhD thesis, but in the law. And as part of that work, she gets to take some courses, so she's in our clean energy law and policy course. We have Chase. Chase is a second-year law student. He's actually been working on energy issues for a long time, even before law school. And so Chase is also in the clean energy law and policy course, and they're working on projects this semester related to real energy issues here in Hawaii, and I'm excited to have them talk about it. So maybe we'll start with Chase. Sure thing. Chase, you want to tell us a little bit about your project? Yeah. I've been studying a recent PPA, which is a power purchase agreement application for a, it's a solar plus storage project on Molokati, and it is going to be actually a quite large project contributing about 45% towards Molokati's 100% renewable portfolio standard goal. And so this project, it's known as Half Moon Ventures, but they're going to be... That's a real project. Yes. This is actually happening. I don't know if it's been fully vetted and accepted, but it's a company called Half Moon doing a project. Yes, sir. Is this coincidence or what? Well, it's going through the process. We'll see. Okay, all right. But so it's now reached the PUC, and so it's being reviewed, but it's quite a large project, and so I'm just examining kind of the various ways it's going to benefit the community, both on the island and in what is the whole... It's like a reality show. You got a real project, then you got a law school project tracking on the real project. It's really very close. It's awesome. It's right inside the deal, eh? Absolutely. It's a fantastic way to learn. We've done two shows on that project, so it might help you in your research to watch the two shows. Definitely. I'll check it out. Okay, is that what you wanted to bring out? Chase, do you want to describe a little bit about the time you spent on Molokai and the perspectives that you've learned from the community? I think, Jamie, you should hear. Yeah, so I had the privilege of going over and attending a community meeting where we had some of the project developers, actually the main project developer, Mike Hasting, so we had representatives from MECO as well and a number of community members. And so it was a really cool experience. It was a great opportunity for the community to learn about the project and to raise some of their questions and hopes and perhaps concerns about the project. So it's really, it's well on the way, but there are still things that are being worked out. And so that community engagement, I think, is going to be really key. So what's your advice to Hastings? What's your statement of concern to him? What should he be looking at? Be his lawyer for a minute. Listen to the community. That's the number one. It didn't take too long to get an answer on that. Yeah, you know, that's the key here in Hawaii. We live in an island. It's a small place. Everyone knows everyone. Every decision, development, it impacts everything else. So it's really key to kind of get that wide... Great. Interesting project. Okay, Richard. Magdalena has an equally interesting project and one that, when she mentioned it to me, my ears really pricked up. She's looking at whether or not real estate investment trusts could be a good vehicle for renewable energy investment. Oh, wow. Do you want to tell us what you know about that, Magdalena? Yeah, so I'm researching the topic and I believe that it would be a good vehicle to expand the sector, to provide investors, or to allow investors, and especially on the local ground where we are so secluded. And that's why we need local people with even small investors to bring some money into. Why a real estate investment trust? Why not an LLC? Because it's an interesting entity that was created in 1960 to expand the two small investors. That was the main idea. But also there are some interesting tax breaks that if REIT meets certain requirements under internal revenue code, then they are not taxed on 90% of their income. So what's also interesting is that because of the broad portfolio of the investments, the possibility of lowering the cost of the renewable energy projects is big if we're thinking about real estate investment trusts. The only problem is the definition of real property. So to actually make it happen and allow those REITs to benefit from the full potential of that entity, we would have to seek some guidance from internal revenue service and expand that definition. Like an opinion or something of revenue ruling. Are you looking for a change in the statute somewhere, federal or state? Not necessarily. We don't need the change in the internal revenue code, only the opinion. So we might be able to move some. So if I tell you that for the past couple of years maybe more there have been bills in the Hawaii State Legislature that would attempt to make REITs taxable here as if they were corporations or else, well corporations. Does that change your conclusion? It doesn't change my conclusion because I do not believe that those bills will succeed. Because what? I do not believe that those bills will succeed. Well they haven't yet. Yes. And there are people who fight Tuesday out to stop them, I might add. As we see there are as many as 42 or even more REITs here in Hawaii that invest in all sorts of real estate including our shopping malls and health care centers and other facilities and doing lots for the local economy. So hopefully we'll allow them to stay benefit from the... Very interesting. Very interesting idea. And even expand them to renewable energy. Yeah sure. That could be a very interesting vehicle to increase the amount of investment locally and also offshore to our projects. We're interesting. Was that your idea? Unfortunately not. Or maybe yes. Okay, why don't you summarize this part and then we'll go to the next. There's an interesting parallel here if you think about it. I know the community on Moloka has expressed an interest in actually owning projects like the Half Moon Ventures Project. Perhaps they need a real estate investment truss that allows these small investments to happen. So these guys are working on cutting edge issues and I'm really excited to read the papers that come out of it and I'll get a little smarter at the end of the semester. No pressure. I'm sure Amir Javendra is watching this show from Moloka. She's the group. A sustainable Moloka. Yeah. Okay. We're going to take a break now. Thank you both. Thank you Chase. Thank you. And thank you Magdalena. Thank you. And we're going to talk to two more of your friends, Richard. Wonderful. Short break right now. You can be the greatest. You can be the best. You can be the king. Come play and know your chest. You can be good. Talk to God. Don't fail your heart. Match day is no ordinary day. The pitch. The pitch. The pitch. The pitch. It looks like the original pitch. Wow. It looks like it's going to be a good match. Out of mud. That's it. Followed ground for players and supporters alike. Excitement builds. Game plans are made with responsibility in mind. Celebrations are underway. Ready for kickoff. MLS clubs and our supporters rise to the challenge. We make responsible decisions while we cheer on our heroes and toast their success. Elevate your match day experience. If you drink, never drive. We're back. We're alive. We've had another break. We're back with Richard Walarsgrove. Professor. I guess mostly in energy or in everything at UH Law School. We end up in everything, but energy law is what gets me excited. Well, let me say that energy touches everything anyway, doesn't it? You can't study it in vacuum, ever. So Richard, would you introduce your next two friends? I would love to, round two. So today we have Tara. She's here, she's working on a project that I think is fascinating, related to her home state, Virginia, and thinking about how we might import renewable energy policies from places like Hawaii to places like Virginia, which have, you know, a whole host of differences. And we have Kevin. Kevin's looking at an equally interesting project. He's looking at the Department of Wine Homelands and how solar development might happen in conjunction with DHHL, particularly concepts like community solar. Who wants to go first? I think I'll go first. Okay. I like that. Building someone off what was just said in the earlier segment, you know, community involvement and community investment in renewable energy and in Hawaii's goals of meeting our renewable energy standards, I think is going to be an important aspect moving forward. So DHHL, Department of Wine Homelands, is uniquely situated in that they have a large amount of land that is potentially available for use for project sites, such as the proposed Kalei Loa solar project. So actually just recently, the bidding period, which was a 21-day period, closed on March 30th for a proposal to build a solar plant near the Kalei Loa airport. My project is looking somewhat at community involvement and how we can bring community members through some sort of investment plan into the scope of these projects rather than just keeping them in the hands of a renewable energy company or any other entity that may pursue it. Is it easier to get money somewhere else? Well, specifically what I'm looking out are the benefits to the recipients of Department of Wine Homelands funds, whether it would be more beneficial to lease the land, which is the proposal now, or to actually be involved in the project and have a power purchase agreement in which members receive a return based on their share, their percentage of shares. So one part of the proposal is to have a 25-year buyback plan where the infrastructure would be built by whatever entity wins the bid. And in 25 years, the Department of Wine Homelands could buy back that parcel fully operational. So I think that potentially that may be a good option to pursue with maybe a shorter time frame for the buyback period. But again, just benefiting the community and in particular Hawaiians and people that DHHL funds are supposed to benefit. So you're a law student. You're creating this plan. There's lots of wrinkles to it. There's legal wrinkles. There's policy.  How do you present? Do you present orally?  If you write in my big paper, do you publish a paper? If you publish a paper, where? And where can I see it? So that was a lot of questions. I think the class has heard me... It's called a multiple compound question. Yes. The class here doesn't even present every day. We have a two and a half hour class once a week. So we have a lot of discussion time during that class. And I don't exactly intend on publishing my research or whatever paper I do write out of this. It was more just an examination. I may bring it to the attention of certain people that are involved in these projects. I have in the past submitted testimony to the PUC and different legislative matters. Perhaps portions of this could be used towards that. But no concrete plans. What strikes me is why I asked you the question about why not use another source of capital. If you have people, local people, people right there on the ground investing, you have buy-in automatically. You have investment and support automatically. You also have the possibility of return. It just makes for a much more robust, nourishing experience for the whole community than trying to get it from Wall Street. Sorry, that's how I feel. Right. I mean, I agree with that. One thing that was interesting, I was looking at the budget for DHHL and their operating budget for fiscal year 2018. Almost $1.5 million towards electricity alone and their operating costs. So potentially buy-ins that could go towards offsetting those costs. Investors from the island locally are great. I think the community can be involved as well. So many great possibilities. Okay, next one. What I haven't told them yet is there's actually an energy paper competition. Papers do right around the end of the semester. And so you may actually see some of these papers in print. I want to see that. We can follow up with that, don't you think? I think we could. So next we have Terry. You want to tell us a little about your ideas about renewable energy in Virginia? Yes. Okay, so my home state is Virginia and I really love Hawaii and learning about the environmental laws that are here. And I would like to try to import those to Virginia because currently Virginia doesn't even have an RPS goal. They have a voluntary RPS goal. And they don't have any incentives for solar. So I think that being able to lobby and get these laws on the books in Virginia would be beneficial, especially from the region that I come from which just so happens to be below the poverty rate in Virginia. So if we could tell them how it will be benefiting them, then lowering energy rates and also with clean energy, I think that would be a great thing to take to Virginia. What about this appeals to you, Richard? Well, I think one of the interesting facets to Terry's idea... Richard's been out of the legislature as much as in a human being alive person kind of thing. What's interesting about this is that I think Terry has a really good understanding of the renewable energy policy landscape here in Hawaii, but she also has a really good understanding of how different the policy landscape is in Virginia. And so she's giving real strategic thought to which policies might work. How do you frame those policies? I think some of the, you know, her idea is about cost as the sort of the driver as opposed to here. We talk about emissions reductions lots of times. The sort of the whole package she brings to this, I couldn't write this paper. There's no way. I don't know enough about what's happening on the ground in Virginia. Do you have any ideas about sort of sequencing? What do you think is the most important policy to get the ball rolling in Virginia? I think for the rest of Virginia, because most of Virginia is actually red even though the state turned blue a couple of years ago, so how I would frame it is the cost reduction in electricity. So I think first thing that would need to be there would be tax incentives, I think. And that would actually start affording it. Otherwise they're not going to get it and our state's not going to have clean energy and it'll be all four ways. Having an RPS goal, but no one being able to afford it or buying in for that reason, then the RPS would be... How do you think that the red counties or the red areas of Virginia would respond to the idea of a tax incentive? I think it would be a very positive thing. So where I'm from is the red part. And AEP right now has a monopoly just in that specific area that I'm from in my region. And electricity costs are extremely high even during the winter because whether people in the red buy into climate change or not, they would still buy into reducing their electric bills because whether they believe climate change is real or not, we're in spring and it's snowing a lot. So they're still having winter electric bills that they're not used to and those are relatively high. So the study is to figure out how to reach people, how to appeal to them on projects and I suppose again how to change their conduct as a group. And what we can learn from other states is useful here. I always find that when you come to legislature, mostly the policy of the people, and you tell them this is the way it works in another state, another state, another state, that's very persuasive because people in Hawaii always want to know, they always want to compete and compare with things elsewhere. So this would be persuasive. I think there's also an issue there with Virginia being red instead of telling them that this state comes from a very progressive state, right? It's a very liberal state. It's going to be, well, this is going to benefit you and this is how. We're really going to have to take both of the parties, putting them together and come together. Richard, what have we learned today? The students in my class are much smarter than we are and so if we're talking about the energy workforce of the future, we're in pretty good hands. All right. That's wonderful. Thank you for coming down, Richard. And thank you Tara and thank you Kevin for having us from before. And I want to do it again. I hope we can do it again. Okay. Come down and talk to us about how these projects unfold, especially after you've arrived at town. Of course. Richard Wallsgrove and Kevin and Tara. Thanks so much.


I will start by asking a very straightforward question, which is how much power today does the world consume? Well it turns out it's about 16 terawatts. Now what that says is it's 16 terawatts of power that will represent as this little dot in the upper left part of the screen. How much renewable energy is available to us? Well that's the other dots on the screen and those are provided by sunlight. There's about 10,000 times more energy given to us by sunlight than what we consume or another way of putting it in an hour of sunlight. If we can collect it all, we could power the planet for the whole year and indeed we are doing it. We use solar technologies to do so, utility scale or residential scale. One thing you'll notice on either one of these, the primary unit that collects the sunlight is a silicon solar cell. There are others but silicon will be the one that you'll most often see.  The answer is no. On the left is a thickness of a silicon wafer compared to a thickness of a hair compared to on the right to the emerging nanoscale films enabled by nanotechnology that we've discovered over the last decades that can now open up opportunities for lightweight and integrated solar use. Here is one example of a nanoscale device. This is a quantum dot enabled thin film solar cell that is semi-transparent and why would you want to make them semi-transparent? Well you can make two of them and if you want you can make one of these, sunglasses. Now these are semi-transparent, I can look through them but at the same time I can collect energy and power electronic devices with them. Why? Because if I happen to have hearing aids or wireless earphones, I would never need to recharge them again as the power collected even in a daily use would be plenty to do the rechargeable opportunity. Different of things that we've been speaking of, how do you power it without having such portable sources? And even more, these types of technologies can be developed in ways that you cannot see before, printing. You can take a piece of paper and you can print nanoscale films to make a solar active surface. Why would you want to do that? Well because you would like to have any object you touch, any surface you interact with, is it documents or packaging or newspapers or communicate, whatever it is, to have an ability to have power attached to it and most importantly, such an ability rather than for us in the developed world, it's for the developing world. This becomes a transformative metric, watts per kilogram. Give me some power for very little weight and you will be able to give me a very transformative opportunity.  But it is a piece of paper so you can use it like any other piece of paper, load it in a printer, print right on top of the solar cell and let's check if it still works. Attach electrodes, shine lights, it still works. This piece of paper is generating enough power to run the common electronic device. That in itself is a transformative opportunity but it's just the beginning because this particular piece of paper still is most of the useless weight is in the paper. Can we thin it down? And the answer is yes, you can. This particular solar cell is so light it can sit on top of a soap bubble. It generates six watts of power per gram of the cell or in other way of putting it six kilowatts per kilogram. As a thin film coating it's an additive surface that would make any surface active. But maybe you don't like the color, in which case we'll give you this one. This is another nanostructure solar cell that doesn't look like anything because it doesn't absorb any visible light. We might as well show you one of these operating. This video shows you the cell and we're going to attach it to the electrodes and again a little motor and see if just the common room light can be enough to power this particular motor. It is. The piece of glass coated with nanostructured films that are designed not to absorb visible light, but absorb infrared and UV light. That is what you're seeing. Solar cell technologies now can be completely different from what you've seen before for personal use, maybe on regular glasses. For portable use, this e-reader would never need to be recharged again if its surface happens to be made of these solar cells. And indeed a skyscraper with windows made of these solar cells could maybe provide a culture of the electricity of a typical office building. Solar has been penetrating remarkably well into our world. One percent of today's electricity is provided by solar. If you look historically, go back to year 2000 and just look year to year to year. The growth rate of silicon deployment is annually 40 percent. Now let's project into the future at that growth rate. And this is what you'll see. By year 2030, about 115 percent of world's electricity could be provided by solar. Or could it? Where the challenge is in the storage. Thank you.