okay hello everyone my name is fellow vonsbergo i'm part of the asher global energy team here at microsoft and it's my pleasure to welcome you all to this session here at the research summit where we're going to talk about advanced carbon capture and energy management so the topic of yeah energy management carbon capture that they're huge and there's no way we can sort of give them just this here in these sessions that we have and i will try to provide a little bit of framing before we enter into these amazing panels that we have managed to put together for you all for this for this session so i think before we dive into this uh the one piece that i'd like to tell our customers my colleagues and and uh you know everyone i talked to on this topic is how energy is implicitly linked to societal progress and i think you know from little simplistic lens you can say that you know access to energy also define your your level of access to energy defines also how developed a nation can be and sort of the pursuit of energy has been relentless for humankind through history and i think we're now in a time period where we're starting to see that also that pursuit has had consequences that um we might not have realized what when certain things were put in motion and you know co2 levels in the atmosphere global warming and all this now we're living living the consequences of this so a great way of looking at this in my mind it is this pie chart that we're seeing right here and and it basically shows that you know if you're going to address the emissions problem you have to address the energy uh problem as well so they in explicitly linked both in course um and solution and i think you then also have the dimension here of you know the different degrees of development across the world so some companies are you know highly developed others are still developing we can't look at this through you know one lens we have to cover all these aspects and i think that's again the complexity and the excitement of this topic and why we need great technology solutions to help you know get us out of this uh track we're in and tackle this emissions problem and then get to a net zero future here you know 20 years out or 20 to 30 years out or or so i'll also say it's geopolitical so there is that angle over here as well and there's not any one company can do but we are really working hard with our energy customers and throwing all the resources we have at it to tackle this problem and get us down to net to net zero so in a summary for our strategy for this you see that if you start from the left there says renewable energy i think that is on everyone's mind we need to up the investments that we need to get that capacity up we need to get countries that need access to energy to start with renewable not go down the hydrocarbon base the route that some of the developed world has relied on for for a long time we need to work on efficient operations and we need you know some of this that we will get to a clean energy future the two topics that we have picked for the um for the panel discussions here at the summit is really related to the two left columns on the renewable side it's about you know how we can integrate renewables into the grids there are lots of technical challenges there that you will hear a panel of you know worldwide academic experts and industry leaders talk about and the topic we picked for efficient operations is really around carbon management of how we can you know collect carbon and safely take it out of the system so that we over time can reduce the concentration of co2 in the atmosphere and and get the sort of these warming trends uh hopefully under under control so before we move into this i think i would like to thank all of these amazing people that we have managed to collect and agree to come and talk to us or talk to all of you today and i wish all of you a sort of amazing journey through both the energy optimization energy efficiency track and the carbon sequestration track that we will move into now so thank you so much hello everyone my name is swear uh svera branson and i'm part of the azure global energy team here at microsoft it's my pleasure to welcome all of you as a truly you know worldwide audience today at this great panel to this session around ccs and we'll get into what that is so we have an amazing collection of industry leaders and experts from academia and i'm confident that all of you will know a lot more about this topic once you exit this session then when we now are kicking it off so we do a quick introduction of the panelists we have dr rohit singh who is the senior vice president of renewables and low carbon technologies at equinor so thank you for being here then we have professor felix herman from georgia tech university and finally daryl willis who is the cbp for energy and sustainability here at microsoft so i said we're here to talk about ccs uh carbon capture sequestration storage i think there are there are many names so those are words that i used in that sequence and you sometimes also hear about the ccus which is the utilization of the of the carbon dioxide i think you can see this in context of renewable recycling and an energy transition in that sense but in a nutshell ccs is the term we will use today to talk about the process of capturing co2 directly from air or from exhaust gases and then storing it or sequestering it for a very very long time so that it no longer acts as a greenhouse gas in in the atmosphere this is a complicated process uh it involves multiple steps and process steps and enactus industry actors etc etc uh if we're here thinking of you know industrial sources of emissions it can be a power plant it can be you know some kind of smoke stack that we see see on a horizon without out and about there are pipelines infrastructure for collection transportation and eventually long-term storage that you know tends to be in a geological formation that's also the sequester term comes in so in the subsurface ccs aims to permanently and safely store the co2 so it is taken out of the atmosphere where it's interacting and sort of helping with or influencing the temperature rise that we're seeing so separately i would say we know how to effectively run every single step of this process of the ccs process but we are here today uh talking about how to make the end-to-end process efficient scalable uh reliable and and you know highlighting that is a big challenge and also pursuing sort of ideas and angles for how a company like microsoft can help facilitate this technology and make it scale and get it out there in action i will end by saying that ccs in itself is not a panacea for for climate change it is one of the tools i would say is one of the key tools that i disposed to go after this problem uh and i think we have as i said some of the world's leading experts here today to help address uh you know put some light on on this challenge that we have in front of us so with that i think we'll dive into into the topic and i've asked rohit to maybe comment a little bit on main trends sort of opportunities and technology challenges that you see from the industry perspective around ccs so rohit yeah thanks for that introduction um so it's a complex topic but let me start by saying that you know the transition the energy transition in front of us and reducing the worst impacts of climate change require almost everything we have in our arsenal ccs is one of them and what we also see now is that beyond generating renew you know electricity and power from renewable sources we also have to think about removing carbon from the atmosphere so when when we are looking at the whole portfolio what we need to do it becomes quite an important component of of society's response um and then you kind of ask the big question he said you know how much can you lock away you know how much can you actually lock away and what's interesting is that the theoretical potential of how much we can lock away is absolutely huge it's in teratons so it is of the potentially of the size of scale that you're looking for but of course it doesn't come for free and that's where some of the biggest uh challenges like in all um you know technologies in general and there is a challenge of getting sufficient scale so that you can drive costs down and that's really i think where the the main technical challenges in some sense on one hand they are about driving cost to a point where it's essentially you know if you think about it unless you're doing something with the carbon that you're capturing which is you're selling for some other as some other product it is a waste management business so the there's a lower cost you can make it the better it is um so that's kind of one of one one one component of of the challenge there the second component of the challenge is can you prove that it stays safely locked away so that's kind of the two two two angles to look at this problem from and i think that's where i would kind of frame it from when you look at the chain of technologies involved from you know from when you capture the carbon to when you lock it into the reservoir um what you what you also notice is that the capture cost tends to be quite high so obviously there is a there is an expectation that technology and innovation drive that cost down over a period of time it's not to say that storage and transport are are solved uh well they are also areas where we expect a lot of innovation to take place but you know dominant the dominant cost still comes from the capture part um the the aspect of transporting carbon dioxide whether it's in pipelines or ships and so on has its own subtle interesting things which which i think many of us will find quite interesting you know first of all you have to deal with many many phases of carbon dioxide it could be in solid it can be liquid it could mean gaseous form it could be in critical phase and often you find a combination of these in these systems that will be eventually what you need to build large-scale ccs work so that's one interesting aspect of it another aspect of it is that when you're actually looking to lock away the the gas and underground formations um you you have to carry you know you have to figure out where to put it and first of all and understand that you know the the amount of storage you expect is exactly what is is is generally what you find um and then as i mentioned uh is there sufficient integrity of the cap rock so is there sufficient integrity in the structure that you choose to lock it in that it actually stays where it is um and it is different from oil and gas and water and so even if oil and gas companies have been trying and actually even have large scale ccs in operation um the nature of the of the material is different so the way it moves around in the subsurface is different so some of these challenges are actually i think quite fascinating at the same time um if you're able to get get a handle on them and really kind of drive the cost and the confidence you know cost down and confidence up we potentially we have a massive opportunity in our hands maybe daryl can compliment me on on some of the uh you know compliment my mic uh you know yeah thank you so much i uh i echo a lot of uh what uh you said and from from from our perspective at microsoft we see stronger climate targets being developed around the world and increased incentives incentives around these climate targets are injecting new momentum from our perspective in the whole ccs journey and i think there's a healthy recognition that we cannot achieve net zero as a company as companies as countries or even as a planet by transitioning to renewable uh energy sources alone we absolutely have to remove carbon from the atmosphere in order to meet the ambitions around net zero by 2050 and some of the things we're doing at microsoft in that regard are as follows one is that you've probably everyone's probably heard over the last couple about 20 months ago or so we announced our target around being net zero by 2030 which means that we'll reduce all the emissions inside of our company by more than half across our entire business including our supply chain ultimately we're gonna we're gonna we're going to remove more carbon than we admit as a company but to put a finer point on that we also said about 20 months ago that by 2050 our goal is to eliminate or remove all the carbon from the environment that we've admitted since microsoft was founded in 1975 through our electricity consumption uh in in other regards and i was i say that to say that these are really bold and big ambitious targets and they're going to require us working and partnering with the industry all industries in order to get there in in in support of that uh we've done a few things we've also recently announced the one billion dollar climate investment fund which is really set up to help us think about how to accelerate the development of carbon reduction capture and removal technologies because a lot of what we'll need in order to make this journey needs to be created it needs to be invested in in a very uh aggressive way and finally as recently as this week we announced a hundred million dollar commitment to breakthrough energy catalyst a program that's designed to innovate around direct air capture around green hydrogen long duration energy storage as well as sustainable aviation fuels one of the things that is really intriguing to me and intriguing to us around ccs is the fact that this capture technology can be retrofitted to um existing plants many of which have recently been built and will probably be operating for decades to come and i'm also excited we're also excited about the fact that there are tens of facilities that are being created around the world in in the air in the area of ccs and that's been occurring over the course of the last four or five years in the us in europe and they're also projects that are emerging in places like australia china korea the middle east and new zealand and finally at the end of the day the last thing i'll say is that when you think about all the carbon that needs to be be removed by 2050 it seems that roughly something on the order of 10 of it can be delivered that removal will be will be could be delivered by ccs so this is a must do and it's something that is very important to us as a company and as we think about our journey and helping the the world deliver on this ambition around that zero yeah thank you for that daryl and rohit i think you know it's great to hear about what the industry is doing and i think uh you know i'm gonna pass it over to felix here and i'll get a little bit of it of you know the view from the academic side because i i think we can all look at sort of history if it's energy production or any sort of human progress it very often plays out as a sort of collaborative effort between industry and academia and i think it's about you know how can we work together here in this you know emerging technology that that needs you know it needs transparency we need to build trust for the technology in in society et cetera now there are pure technical challenges that that would take all the best people we have to to track those so felix what are your thoughts on on that yeah so a couple of things i i do agree that ccs is really a technology that we should explore to combat climate change but it's very challenging and you know amongst all the different features that we have to look into i think it's important that we build a monitoring system maybe in particular a seismic monitoring system and saying that because we need to really gain the trust of the general public and we can do that by being very transparent why i'm saying that is that if you look for geothermal energy they had a small earthquake in switzerland that basically stopped the global development of geothermal for a long time and that keeps me awake at night so you want to deal with that also after a ccs project is completed the regulators will have to take it over and they will have to assume a liability and they want to know what's going on and so for that the monitoring system is essential too and finally you want to increase the success rates of ccs projects and to optimize the process of the sequestration itself and for that a monitoring system can play an an important role the tesco is massive um it relies on 3d imaging technology that has been used by the oil and gas industry and that has dominated hpc technology for many years but that's a massive exercise it also depends on the availability of data sets and compute cycles uh because as i mentioned it's a very computational intensive technology to to monitor co2 and to find out whether our accidental leaks or compromises of the system and so all this is compounded by the fact that you have to do this monitoring sort of continuous so just to put things into perspective if you think about 3d imaging for those of you who know about neural networks that is sort of equivalent to running a 10 000 layer convolutional network with about a billion features and that's and you have many of those so this is a formidable very large-scale uh computational problem and the challenges are compounded by the fact that while the oil and gas industry used to have access to their own premise hpc systems those golden days are over so we need to come up with a new way to do that and one way you could think about that is to create basically a supercomputer for seismic monitoring sort of modeled along the lines how the open ai initiative is is constructed and that will allow academia and startups and others to develop an open source source framework for seismic monitoring also very much like as being done within the open ai project and well this is open source so the challenge here is can we find mechanisms to monetize seismic monitoring algorithms for instance so can people in academia fund their students with this can startup uh fund themselves or can even companies like microsoft uh make money out of this so that goes back to the to the economic picture that was alluded to before now i'm optimistic that this can work i was involved in the international inversion initiative in brazil where the um there were tax incentives um related to oil and gas production which led a british gas company to basically build a 70 000 core system for my group and a group of imperial to develop basically imaging technology for seismic and that was a fantastic initiative where uh government incentives by tax a public-private partnership was built to basically develop a technology uh in collaboration with academics so that's i think a model we should entertain yeah i think that there are great models that we can sort of look back at that have fostered this sort of public private partnership and innovation and i'll ask rohit to maybe comment a bit on this because you know i see ecuador as being leaders and sort of you know as an open source or making data publicly available so that both you know academic institutions and you know ngos anyone can see it so it is about that transparency so if you could comment maybe a little bit on data and also the sort of potential role of open source because i think the you know only gas industry has not been big on open source data and i think that's sort of right there like myself i had to sort of say okay what role can we eventually play there is there a room you know is there a role to play for open source in in this arena going forward yeah sure so maybe i can i can let me start a little bit in history so there is a field west of norway called sleipner and and sleipner has been injecting carbon dioxide and locking it away um in an aquifer for for 20 plus years now now why is that um and that's a little bit to felix's point you know at least in in norway the fiscal setup was there that this made business sense and therefore such a project was created and a project was executed and actually what it what it resulted in is not only that we got it as a company got experience of running a large scale project of this nature we also got um exp you know we also got lots of data so how are the wells doing what all the seismic surveys you know what about the models and so on and we decided some years back that this to be able to actually bring you know again to what felix was saying to bring public confidence in the technology that we can actually safely do it monitor that the carbon dioxide stays it's supposed to do we decide to release that data into the into the open domain for people to work with and and then if i look at the future um when you say as a company we also want to make a business out of this and for it to work we need it to be adopted so i my my my belief is that we will we will take a much more uh for the lack of a better word and modern view on it uh particularly in the low carbon space than perhaps what we have seen in a you know in an oil and gas type of perspective and we see that change also in the you know even in the oil and gas universe uh initiatives like the subs open subsurface data universe are really about trying to find common components that don't need to be proprietary that actually can can trigger innovation and there is a i think more and more recognition that these kind of methods and techniques will ultimately be much more beneficial to us than than the approaches we've used in the past so i have i have little reason to believe that we regress from this kind of approach if anything i expect to see much more yeah now it's good to hear these examples from norway and there will maybe you can comment a bit on what you're seeing a sort of trends globally because i mean you you visit with most players uh that are you know in this field i have ambitions to be in this field so what are your thoughts or observations from from those interactions yes thank you so i see we see a couple of things i think i would i would probably make three or four three or four uh brief points the first one is that uh most of the executives that i find myself in conversations with around the world are really thinking deeply around what their relationship to a true net zero ambition is and so i think every c-suite on the planet has a slide that talks about uh its relationship to esg and its relationship to uh what is doing around the environment and sustainability but they're trying to really cultivate a much more meaningful relationship and and and one of the things and one of the questions that i continue to get uh whether it's a power and utility company oil and gas company or even a mining company is how can you help us and what role is there for microsoft to help us and we and we typically have a conversation with them around three things one is around the fact that we've recently announced our cloud for sustainability which we really think will help every customer do a better job around tracking emissions from all sources and then creating more importantly creating a plan to to reduce them we also spend quite a bit of time getting a lot of questions around data that sits on the edge in the uh well-known space of iot and and how can iot and how can data analytics help us and i think about uh things we're doing as we as we work on ccs projects with equinox and shell and total and we think about how do you track volumes as an example from a point of into ingestion into a ccs system to to really help you better enable the reporting of fugitive invention emissions at every point along the way so using uh iot platforms is an area where there's a lot of interest and and and support and the last thing i would say is that many companies are really thinking more deeply about the fact that they want to focus on what they're good at they want to focus on what they're good at and saying in many cases you know what we've been managing data centers we've been doing a lot of things on-prem and we would rather identify a trusted partner that we can work with who can help us tap into the elasticity of the cloud as well as do a better job of protecting data because at microsoft our license to operate is is driven by our ability to uh create space and protection space for data but also protection for data and that's been a a really uh those are some of the bigger conversations i found myself being involved in over the course of uh the last 12 to 24 months yep not excellent and i think you mentioned cloud for sustainability and we also have an initiative called the planetary computer that microsoft has launched and i'm sitting here wondering if if those are the kind of angles that we could take and create sort of an environment for data to grow its point 20 years a day so it's available i mean we're used to maps and satellite images but what about this kind of data for a research community for an academic community uh but then that you know you mentioned implicitly platform you said they don't want to get out they want to get out of the data center business and you know have toolings i'll pivot back to this sort of open source question and sort of put that out to to be commented on you know what level of investments that sort of common baseline open source functionality would be useful in this space what would a company like ecuanor see that they could use you know what would you want to keep for it for yourself is this a path that is that merits with that we put some muscle behind it and try to pursue it yeah let me try to answer it two ways you know um one kind of you know in general what we find now when i and i'm now stepping out from ccs and looking at how we are looking at technology in general so when we're looking at technology in general we are also we are realizing uh obviously that uh you know software plays a bigger and bigger role in almost every technology activity that we partake in and innovation in software increasingly uh pushes us towards use and reuse of open source so uh you know one way or the other we are moving towards uh we are moving towards more and more open source then when i look at low carbon space and ccs is one one of the topics in there these are nascent businesses these are nascent markets and you know in a lot of cases it's not everything is known and in this case companies like ours and and our peers and and so on we are much more open to reimagining how ecosystems should come together so i think when i combine those two things what's happening the technology trend in general and what's specific about the low carbon space and ccs is one of them what you find is a a much more open and um and and permissive discussion around how should we leverage these technologies so it's much less protectionism than you probably have experienced before and much more about how do we solve this problem and and i'm very encouraged to see that and then i hope that trend really actually continues okay that should be music to your airspeed experience you know you've been one of the pioneers so open source and also what i would say sort of low code no code sort of modularization of these toolkits historically from seismic imaging and you know how would you want to see this progress in this space and maybe add some comments on this angle of sort of transparency and trust building for society because i think that's another sort of important angle here that is different than someone who just pursues say a business objective yeah so i i look i agree i think it's a fantastic candidate for open source right to because you're guaranteed transparency people can be reproduce you can give people access to technology everywhere around the world and my group is developing a software platform to do exactly that to de-risk basically the development of a cycling monitoring system the problem is a little bit though from an academic perspective and i know there are initiatives that are basically making open source seismic imaging uh solutions where a lot of people still have the attitude well thank you very much it's open source we take it and why would we pay for it and that goes back to the remark i made earlier is that we have to really find a model how to fund open source and so for instance if open source yields uh that microsoft can sell a ton of cycles to somebody then perhaps the people that develop these algorithms should have access to a piece of supply to pay their students or to pay their summer salary or to provide other incentives right so um i think that's essential but it is clear that open source is the way to accelerate innovation it's the way to give people around the world access to the risk this technology to start to do their homework to convince all the stakeholders and the general public of the safety of the technology so there's no doubt that that's the way to go you know maybe there's some homework here for daryl and myself to think about these vehicles that we have in microsoft to support these activities um i would also talk about you know github and other you know tools that we have in our in our arsenal here that we could potentially use to facilitate this and you know i'll give another plug for this planetary computer which i think is sort of the right framing for this because it is about you know impact to climate change and as i said you know in the introduction this is one of multiple technologies but to sort of put it in that context i think uh you know would make this become a known entity for people as the technology as the technology matures so i think moving forward and we don't have a lot of time for for this panel and also knowing our audience here we are at the microsoft research summit and we're talking about that exciting big challenge and i think that there are some big challenges here but i will let all of you comment a little bit sort of what are some of the key challenges and maybe a little bit of sort of you know direct challenges to the audience yes msr community plus plus you know what what are some of the things you would like to see activity and pursuit and innovation happen along you know the horizons related to to ccs and i'll let rohit kick it off as you you're sitting closest to implementation of this these days yeah sure thanks so you know i would have said you know um even though we didn't spend too much time on the capture part absolutely fantastic area and i think you know i really encourage people to to look into how they could contribute you know improving and you know eventually has impact on direct air capture which uh has a huge potential so i think you know looking into that i think is is is very interesting then i think you know and i know felix will cover monitoring so i'll try to cover a couple of other things uh you know there is something about understanding you know before you decide that i'm going to do a ccs project here you have it's a very different one from an orange gas project yes there's many similarities but the risk profile is different so how do i get basin semi-basic scale modeling up with relatively sparse data up front in the thing and and this is referring back to high performance computing machine learning what can we do to accelerate our understanding up front to understand this is actually a good place where we can actually secure um secure a project of a certain size because scale matters and scale actually drives on the cost and makes these projects happen so i think dynamic modeling at a very large scale super interesting and i think the other thing i would have said is that when you put the whole system together the well the you know the the reservoir uh and how the you know how the how the how the fluid moves in it and how the carbon dioxide is transported to it to the pipeline there's something about system architectures and keeping quite a bit of your optionality till you actually fix the project again sounds very similar to it in gas but the margins are much smaller you know this is a negative margin game in some sense so how do i get that far more automated so not take months and years to do this how do i get it really rich really fast really uh so i can i can get these projects scaled out and i'll stop because i know there's plenty more ideas here so yeah daryl you're smiling us i'll let you you seem like you have something to add on here because i don't feel like we'll get into this monitoring piece again so uh please right thank you sir i think i'll i'll just kind of reflect at a high level on on what's on my mind as i think about the journey we're all on with this in a ccs space i i guess maybe three or four points the first one is that going back to something i think felix said that this is or maybe it was roy of both but this is a really big ambitious journey and it's not easy and i think it's important to recognize that this is really really hard and that's why it's not been done um that's a high level point i wanted to make some bullets under that would be pace matters i think that we the industry has gone from a period where it was big was better but i think fast is better now so the pace at which we do things is absolutely essential the second sub point is that partnership matters industry industries like microsoft working with equino and work with academia like felix is absolutely critical no one will tackle this and solve this alone so pace matters partnership matters the third thing is that openness i believe openness wins and close lose loses no company no country no institution academic institution will be able to solve this on its own and the last point i wanted to make is that we're trying to do all of this in a context that we don't talk about that much and spare you maybe think about it when you mention the planetary computer in that computer and that context is that over the course of the next 30 years the population on a planet is going to increase from seven and a half billion people to 10 billion people so there will be two and a half more billion people who need access to clean energy who need access to clean water and who need access to food so those are big challenges we're trying to solve some big challenges around ccs but the planet is continuing to expand and grow and that's just going to make it even more challenging so those are the things on my mind as i kind of think about the what's in front of us yep no very very very valid point so felix uh i think we're down to three minutes so you can you can round this one out there now please sure i'll do that okay first i i do talk to world leaders at georgia tech and direct air capture so that's actually quite nice a large engineering school at georgia tech there are all these collaborations and and we talk so but let's just go back to what i do that's seismic monitoring so i think there's reason to be optimistic right an academic group that i've been leading first in canada and now in the us we have been responsible for 10 times improvements in acquisition productivity that is 10 times cost reduction that's massive we have done the same for the computational cost i feel that with the technologies we have and we will have in the near future using machine learning we can easily go 20x or up in cost reductions of seismic monitoring and the reason we can do this because universities are very agile so for instance we were able to reproduce and build on a modern industry skill imaging technology on a budget of like one or two million whereas companies have spent hundreds even billion or two billion dollars on developing that technology so i'm optimistic but you have to empower universities universities have to hire students students are not cheap right compute is not cheap we need access to that and so and then i think there are plenty of people interested because we can do something for the good and this is much more interesting than running machine learning on a youtube video the problems are fantastic you help society combat climate change so i'm optimistic but we have to find ways how this is being funded and then faculty will be incentivized thanks very good now as i promised better understanding and i think that i know i've learned a lot now listening in this conversation for the last 30 minutes and so i think that if we can help drive understanding and provide the correct incentives for partnerships to do good to go after this problem that's probably the best angle for us all to take collectively to to address this ccs problem or the ccs challenge is a better better term so with that i'll thank all of you panelists for for spending time with us uh today i hope we can get back together and reflect on this and i thought the next steps in on this journey at a future time and thanks again on behalf of microsoft for participating in this event thanks thank you sir thank you thank you hi everyone welcome to the microsoft research summit panel i'm john lennon global power and utilities leader for azure engineering and i will be monitoring the panel discussion today and our topic to cover is meeting co2 emission targets and the role of the grid a few opening remarks so countries around the globe have been setting co2 emission reduction targets to address the impact of climate change for the u.s the buying administration has set up course that looks to achieve net zero co2 emissions by 2050 for the nation the path includes targets for 2030 to achieve 50 reductions from 2005 levels and a 2035 target to have a carbon emission free power sector so focusing on the power grid which accounts for about 30 percent of co2 emission this panel will discuss the potential paths that can lead to deep decarbonation of the grid and the role the grid will have in decarbonizing the energy-intensive sectors as those sectors transition from combustion to electrification so to join me in this discussion we have three extraordinary panel members and i'd like to give a brief introduction to each panel members so our first panel member professor stan whittingham from suny binghamton he's the inventor of the lithium battery and for that work he's won the 2019 nobel prize winner uh stan a brief opportunity to give yourself a few words of introduction in current research interests yes so i'm stan whittingham i'm professor of chemistry and material science at binghamton university and i'm still very active in improving um lithium ion batteries we're looking at new anno's trying to get back to lithium looking at better cathodes with the goal with the doe consortium of getting to 500 watt hours per kilogram we're also very busy here in the southern tier of new york and trying to build an ecosystem for green energy with a gigafactory under construction the solar facility also moving into the area wow thank you very much stan great to have you our next uh panel member is professor arun jandar from stanford university arun is the founding director for the us doe advanced research project agency rpe and was former acting under secretary of energy arun is a member of u.s national academy of science us engineering u.s national academy of engineering and the american academy of arts and science arun great to have you a chance to give a self introduction in your current areas of interest well john thanks a lot for inviting me and all of us to this panel first of all we are very excited at stanford that we are starting a new school on climate and sustainability and this is the first school stanford has started in 73 years so we are trying to figure out exactly how to do it but in fact this is a part of a broader global engagement as well but the emphasis on climate sustainability is huge as for my own research we are looking at greenhouse gas free hydrogen production as lower cost as possible we're looking at direct air capture because that's going to be hugely important and how to make it more energy efficient and reduce the cost and and on the a we are also we have a group looking at ai and machine learning to look at climate risk for communities because i think we have to elevate the issue of adaptation and resilience as much as decarbonization because we're likely to go beyond uh 1.5 and perhaps even two
and trying to understand the climate threats in terms of the statistics of that with the vulnerabilities of local communities so we're trying to use machine learning to to figure out what are the hot spots for climate in the future so that people at the end of the day are not affected so that's that's an area that we're sort of exploring right now that's super interesting area um so thanks arun for joining today and our third panel member is john wellinghoff john was appointed the commissioner as commissioner to the federal energy regulatory commission ferc in 2006 and was appointed to the chairman in 2009 to 2013. uh john is the uh currently the ceo for grid policy and during his time at ferki established groundbreaking policy for grid transformation and renewables smart grid distributed a distribution efficiency evs as a form of storage and demand response john great to have you a brief self uh intro and some current interest from you it's good to be here john thank you very much yes um john wellinghoff ceo of grid policy uh also work with a company on the demand side voltas that does uh distributed energy platforms on the markets uh primarily demand response and other distributed energy resources so some of the things i'm working on in addition to what i'm working on with voltus in integrating distributed energy resources into the grid into the transmission grid i'm working with a number of large clients on the grid policy side trying to make the grid more efficient and also more acceptable to uh integrating renewable energy into that system uh there's a large uh policy initiative right now going on at ferc it's called an a-noper an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking on transmission planning and cost allocation i'm very involved in that proceeding in fact i'm writing comments for that proceeding uh currently for a very large client who's an off taker of over several gigawatts of renewable energy throughout the u.s and they're very interested in ensuring that interconnection into the transmission system can be done efficiently and cost effectively and that we have the ability to build out the transmission system that we need to actually decarbonize the grid by 2035 so those are some of the things i'm working on john that's great uh super excited to have you here today john and have the three of you uh panel members together really quick to set the stage because i want to get to the questions so the goal of the panel is like briefly discussing these kind of potential paths for the grid to meet the 25 30 goals and beyond given the tremendous breadth of the of the options that we could focus on here um you know where can we actually focus first to have the most impact and um when appropriate how can data and say new algorithms and ai and reinforced learning be used to uh accelerate these options and when i think about uh kind of the you know the options we have just break it down into two buckets there's technology trans transformation and then there's policy and market transformation um so around the technology transformation i don't want you know there's a lot of topics transmission distribution renewables energy storage data nuclear massive css cc us and direct carbon capture and if you think about those technologies being successful what are kind of the policies and market transformations that need to happen and maybe we may or may not get to this but if we had a blank sheet of paper in policy what would be some of the potential paths we could take and some of the kind of things related around market with pursuers and peer-to-peer kind of markets arising these the kind of next generation markets and you know around regulation and cyber you know how do we unlock data and also how do we secure data as the data is becoming more highly distributed so just a few kind of um areas i think we can cover in these topics and and so let's get to the question so my first question is for a roon in the room you've held numerous leadership positions related to energy for the nation and that rpu fostered this um methodology for identifying a problem to solve the value of that problem and then the breakthrough technology and science needed to achieve those goals i'm wondering if you could help set the stage here by here also um so my question for you is how would you break down this the problem to reach the zero co2 by 2035 for the power sector and what are the key areas that you think are the where we can make an impact with today's technologies but where are the other uh areas to focus at we need transformational technology changes first of all john let me just applaud the efforts that microsoft is making to first of all make a commitment and following up on that and we had your chief sustainability environmental officer lucas joppa on a dialogue with on stanford campus obviously on zoom and and sort of lay out what you guys are planning to do and it is very impressive and you're taking a leadership role in the corporate world with potentially broad impact on society so let me just break it if you ask me you asked me to break it down i would break it down into three pieces one is that and i and i hate to start as a scientist and engineer it's it's one is accounting and i think when you're trying to get to zero you you have to sort of look at scope 1 scope 2 scope 3 emissions and scope 1 and scope 2 are relatively easy scope 3 is difficult and we don't have a mechanism that is agreed upon by everyone to understand what is scoped permissions and this needs science engineering and data to be able to do that so i and i'm hoping that microsoft will take the lead on that because i believe 70 to 75 percent of your emissions are in scope 3. so trying to get so this is
not just a goal i'm assuming and i'm hoping that there'll be a research effort inside microsoft to not only look at scope 3 emissions internally but also hopefully add and enable and empower others to have a standard of some kind so that's sort of one then of course you need new technologies i mean i think you are putting looking at renewable or carbon free power not just in a gigawatt hour level annually but 24 7 right and so that is going to be very important and of course that involves renewables and involves storage and coordination in the grid which will require data and cloud services etc but given where we are and what you want to be eventually you also need technologies for negative emissions and and that is going to be very important and you know this is still i would say early days of that not just climate natural climate solution which has lots of uncertainty but also direct air capture and other things which will help to and those are still wide open because we are at least a factor of 20 away from thermodynamic limit so there's a lot of room for improvement out there and there's r d needed for that and and you're using energy in your buildings and data centers etc and we had a discussion with with lucas on building and you know you're trying to make your lead rated building which is terrific but i would also say that lead rating is only for the design it's not for performance actual real-time performance and i think this is where microsoft could play a role in a leadership role and actually looking at data and measurement and reporting out the measured performance of these buildings and understanding where the problems are because unless you measure you'll never know and and so i think there's a whole gamut of things and i would say that this is while it has it's a goal that may have come from top down i i think there is also an embracement of the people at microsoft to do this to change the behavior change the approach so there's an operational part of it which i think is going to be hugely important and finally i would say that your corporate leadership i know that you're volunteering in sec disclosures what your carbon footprint is i think that's that's that's terrific that you're volunteering because it may become a requirement by a cc to do that and so i think there is a role that microsoft can play not only internally in reducing it carbon footprint getting it to zero but it's really empowering people and and i know this is part of your mission statement and organizations to also become carbon free as zero carbon by 2030 2035 and this is these are the early days so trying to create and and you know mechanisms to do that technologies to do that policies to do that i think it's going to be hugely important so applaud microsoft's effort in that i think that's a great answer uh really informative um so getting on kind of these kind of policy changes we talked about so question for john under your leadership at ferc you established i think kind of visionary policy towards transforming the grid that you know at the time the learning curves from predicting the cost and p of pv and wind and batteries were pretty uncertain and now we see uh renewables solar wind you know in cases lower than say coal fire generation or batteries coming down and cost you know a 10x from a thousand to under 100 dollars per kilo watt hour per kg so what what do you think are some of the key requirement requirements that policy would need to cover to adopt a zero emission grid and how would the fine finance and market mechanisms need to change to adopt that well we did certainly see john at the time i was at ferc uh even though the um the cost curves were uncertain with respect to these technologies we saw them rapidly changing to the point that we did recognize that there was the um great great level of certainty that we were on that trajectory so we did try to at least start some policies put in place some policies order one thousand with respect to transmission planning caustic allocation order 845 which related to demand response on the demand side to ensure that consumers with their resources behind the meter could participate in markets and a number of other orders and regulations that we put in place but going forward i think we will need to continue to have those policies evolve ferc has put in place recently within the last two years or a year and a half actually in order 2222 that relates solely to distributed resources which i think here's an area where microsoft can i think play a huge role in in helping consumers uh better understand the resources that they have behind the meter uh putting in places software and the data acquisition systems that can coordinate those resources and then help those resources become part of a platform that is aggregated with other resources within one of the companies i work with voltus does this exact thing but i think it can be expanded tremendously across all customer sectors and that is a platform for consumers to utilize their resources behind the meter and i'm talking about demand response that is load flexibility we're talking about distributed generation we're talking about on-site storage and we're talking about evs as well all those technologies utilize them as grid resources utilizing them as resources to make the grid more stable more reliable and a better more functioning grid to integrate in large levels of renewables offshore wind large scale wind farms and large scale solar into the grid in a more reliable uh more stable and and and rational way and to do that from a financial uh structure perspective as you ask that question we really need to ensure that these markets financially value these resources behind the grid that consumers have again something that order 2222 is trying to do and that order is in its implementation stages right now i'm involved with the number of clients helping them with respect to putting together the implementation tariffs that each of the regional markets are to put in place for this and also expanding those markets we only have uh organized independent markets in this country in about two-thirds of the areas of the country there's really no markets in the southeastern united states and there's no markets in the west with the exception of california although that's changing in the west they do have a sort of a market light in part of the west called an energy balance market but we need to expand those wholesale markets everywhere so consumers will have availability to those markets and those financial values can be available and transparent to consumers so that they can expand those resources to make the mar the the grid work more efficiently for the integration of higher levels of low carbon resources that's a challenging prospect but looking at der i mean the grid becoming more highly distributed and utilizing those resources for flexibility is certainly a uh you know some of that groundbreaking policy around for 2222 is certainly geared towards that speaking around um energy storage so i have a question for stan um and so and you know microsoft is uh plant has plans to move to a you know zero diesel in the next few years so backup generators wanting to move to something um you know zero emission type uh goals for uh backup generations for data centers and so of course people are looking into lithium ion but uh you know global production capacity for lithium ion is predicted to grow from say 300 gigawatt hours in 2018 to over two terawatt hours and much of this capacity i think around 70 to 80 percent is get aimed at evs and stand so given the current lithium technology which is as far as i understand too expensive for durations in grid storage for applications above four hours can lithium ion in its current form ever meet those longer durations in cost and cycle life and um you know what are the uh kind of other viable energy storage candidates that look promising at this point so i think one area that um is particularly exciting now um is the so-called million mile battery no one's really going to drive a million miles but if a battery would last that long then you can think of the vehicles being plugged into the grid at all times when they're not actually being driven on the road so they'll give better resilience to the grid they'll also allow you know the grid to put storage in or take it out whenever they need it but obviously we'll need the warranties changed on the vehicles but that's i think probably a better option than thinking about batteries as a second life on the grid but right now no lithium ion is about a hundred dollars a kilowatt hour that's what the auto companies are paying um if we get all the cobalt out price could go down lower but i think a real issue we have to address now is the sustainable production of the lithium-ion batteries according to various producers it takes between about 50 and 60 kilowatt hours of energy to produce a one kilowatt-hour battery a lot of that's in the mining and the processing so i think we have to look at ways to update that maybe ai and a lot of modeling expertise can help us do that and clearly we need localized supply chains by localized i i'm talking about like in north america or in europe and the europeans are doing that it's not clear north america is doing that right now that will cut the price down and i think it depends on the market how long um how viable lithium ion is for grid storage no some of the regulations only um allow recovery of the cost if it's four hours or less so in some cases it may um be economically viable to run it for longer but i think as the price comes down if we switch from the oxides to the phosphates that should help also reduce the price but i think a lot of people are talking about um flow batteries to um cut the cost a lot the big challenge there is flow battery is a chemical plant a lot of the utilities like to be flexible they're like mobility and that the presence of the present lithium-ion storage systems are in trailers they can move it around as they have the need so we had a system in binghamton it worked well then they found they could make more money and ohio so they took it away one night and moved it to ohio so i think the options then clearly an opportunity is the one you mentioned in large data centers grid storage um no on a small scale scale and what you call that nano grades micro grids but clearly batteries can do that and i think exciting there may be some activity in solid state batteries where you don't have to worry so much about the temperature of operation of the battery so a normal grid um lithium-ion battery is only about 70 percent efficient because more than 20 percent of the engine is used used in um air conditioning of the system to keep the battery happy because today lithium-ion batteries like the same conditions as all of us like whereas if we go to a solid state they can run up to 100 degrees fahrenheit probably without without too much issue at all it's probably somewhat higher so i thin
2022-02-03