**CONCLUSION: MR. SWISHER**

Andy Karsner has served as Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and
Renewable Energy at the Department of Energy, since March of 2006. In a
relatively short time he's made a very big difference. You know you hear
sometimes, that in this world of increasingly complex organizations it's
hard for an individual to make a difference. You hear the term about
government bureaucracy thrown around, as if it\'s just a given. But I
think in our governmental institutions, as throughout society,
leadership matters and can be transformational. And I think Andy's
energy and enthusiasm for the mission, \-- I know, because I talk to his
staff, that kind of energy and enthusiasm is contagious and has seeped
through the organization; the 1.2 billion dollar organization that he
manages on behalf of the Department. He has a strong private sector
background and that kind of experience has helped provide him with a
vision, again, that has provided a kind of leadership with the
Department that has been immensely valuable.

It is my pleasure to introduce the Honorable Andy Karsner.

**[THE PRESIDENT'S ADVANCED ENERGY INITIATIVE:]{.underline}**

**[PATHWAY TO A STRONGER AMERICA]{.underline}**

**SECRETARY ALEXANDER KARSNER**

Thank you, Randy, that is too kind. And thank you all for that warm
welcome. I'm honored to be contributing to the wrap-up of these
extraordinary days. What a conference. It reminds me of that old saying
in Washington that actually everything's already been said, just not
everybody's had a chance to say it yet.

Let me begin with the most important duty, by thanking our many, many
fine sponsors and expressing gratitude for Secretary Mike Johanns and
Under Secretary Tom Dorr, for their continuous collaboration, as well as
our many colleagues from DOE and USDA who worked so hard to make this
unprecedented event a reality.

I especially want to thank Secretary Sam Bodman, with whom I'm so
privileged to serve, for his strong and pragmatic and steadfast
leadership. He, alone, with Under Secretary Ray Orbach, who you heard
from this morning, offered detailed insights into the scientific and
technological R & D that is the real strength of the Department of
Energy. Unlike these men, I'm not a scientist, but being one of the
first businessmen appointed to this post, my perspective inevitably
looks to mobilize and catalyze the forces of free enterprise and venture
capital, investment and finance, to grow and commercialize America\'s
new energy economy.

Indeed, to succeed in implementing the Advanced Energy Initiative, we
cannot divorce science from commerce. Nor can we afford any separation
between innovation and entrepreneurship. I view our future success as
resting upon a three-legged stool, comprised of science and markets and
policy. We can't achieve any of our hopes if any one leg of this stool
is missing or imbalanced or too weak to support the others. A proper and
holistic perspective on getting renewable energy technologies down the
cost curve, must include a discussion of internal rates of return,
return on equity, basis points, debt circumference ratios, net present
value and net profits. But in the political capitol of the world's
greatest fee market nation, these terms are spoken too infrequently. And
even when they are spoken, they are too frequently misunderstood. Yet,
developing an understanding of that which is catalytic to markets and
that which directs capital flow, is precisely what Washington needs to
divide defective policy and informed group decisions, so that we might
seek to replicate and proliferate and accelerate clean energy
technologies into the heartland and into the mainstream.

After more than a quarter of a century of this nation aggressively
investing in the research and development of clean, green, domestic,
abundant and affordable sources of power generation and fuels, the time
is now more than ripe to reap the harvest. And the timing could not be
more opportune. Our challenges are so great and our solutions must be
greater.

We're at war. On many mornings we awaken to the evidence of the
brutality and the inhumanity of a terrorist and fundamentalist enemy
that would readily leverage energy over our economic future, if they
could do so. Advancing renewable energy and attacking wasteful
inefficiencies is a domestic epicenter of the war on terror.

Our air quality and environment is at risk and we all aspire to address
the concerns of a world that is incurring pollution and climate change.
And we are increasingly engaged in the greatest global economic
competition that this nation has yet known and how we fare in it will
affect our children's inheritance of an American dream that you and I
have the good fortune to experience every day. Neither the Government
nor the private sector can be fully effective in addressing these
challenges alone, in isolation of one another. And we must draw upon our
creativity and agility to grow new forms of public/private partnerships
like those that have been born these past few days in St. Louis.

Our capital markets represent the most powerful, prolific, expedient,
effective delivery mechanism for widespread transformation that free
society has evolved. But markets don't create national strategy, only
dedicated government leadership can fulfill that role. And this is the
essence of the leadership that President Bush and Secretaries Bodman and
Johanns, are applying to the Advanced Energy Initiative.

To successfully execute a market transforming strategy, private and
public sectors must work more closely, figuratively, with regular and
recurring feedback loops cultivating the objectives of one anther and
break themselves out of the tired old patterns of what my colleague Tom
Dorr described as business as usual.

Last January, President Bush called upon us all to address this
nation\'s addiction to oil. He laid out a vision of changing the way we
power our homes and offices and vehicles. And he introduced the Advanced
Energy Initiative as the plan to get us there. Its goals are ambitious,
but not exclusive. Its stretch targets are grand, but they are not at
all beyond our reach. Our challenge is to pull together as we have done
during this conference and plan the resources and milestones, action
plans, time-lines and deliverables, for both basic and applied science,
for research and development and commercial deployment.

Regarding alleviation of our petroleum dependency, let's consider the
Presidents biofuels initiative, which seeks to displace up to 30 percent
of our present gasoline consumption by 2030. President Bush has set the
goal that cellulosic ethanol should be commercially competitive by 2012.
Now that's not just a long-term vision, that's a business plan shared by
many of you in this room. This means that even as we enjoy today, robust
and record rates of growth and conventional biofuels, we must address
the growing pains of bottlenecks in transportation, terminal facilities
and construction, as well as the disconnects, and the cost of inputs and
outputs that substantially affect price volatility.

These difficulties and potentially others, become more apparent as new
business models emerge to accommodate the exponential growth of
America's domestic biorefining capacity, which this year surpassed
Brazil, to become the largest on earth. The department's technology
pipeline aims to address in a balanced and thoughtful way long, medium
and near turn opportunities, in order to keep the rate of renewable
energy technologies flowing steadily and continuously towards the
marketplace. And this is no less true for other alternative fuels such
as biodiesel, plug-in electric power and hydrogen fuel cells.

The President's Advanced Energy Initiative has also inspired us to
pursue the possibilities of achieving up to 20 percent capacity of
emission-free, affordable, utility grade wind power generation.
President Bush governed the State that is today, the national leader in
wind power production and growth, largely because he brought the right
policies into being. So this Administration intimately understands the
value of accessing our abundant renewable resources, however remote they
may be, with enhanced grid integration, grid expansion and grid
modernization. And now the Nation is poised for yet another year of
record expansion that will leave energy dollars and new jobs in rural
America and continue our inexorable margin to reclaim world leadership
in wind power generation.

The Solar America Initiative is already producing results, raising
efficiencies and moving down the cost curve towards widespread
availability and competitiveness. But our program goals go well beyond
unit pricing for peak power generation, it also includes creating new
lives of building integrative solar products, like roof tiles and
flexible material and generating windows that will enable construction
of cost-neutral, zero energy homes and offices to permanently change the
air de-consumption and carbon footprints of the built environment.

The prospect of massive penetration of renewable sources like wind,
solar, geothermal, biomass, biofuels and hydrogen, as well as vehicle
efficiency technologies and new engine technologies and battery storage
technologies, is not only possible, it is something that is
quantifiable. Goals that can be planned and pursued and managed and
funded, if we are willing to do what Americans do best, embrace
innovation and entrepreneurship, marry science together with commerce,
think dynamically and not be consumed by the seemingly static nature of
the status quo.

Henry Ford used to say, *"Whether you think you can or you think you
can't, either way, in the end you'll end up proving yourself right."*
That's just about where we are today, profiting from the enormous
opportunity at present, perched on the cusp of realizing far greater
possibilities in the face of great uncertainty ahead. Do we retreat from
our fears that this is but a temporary boom or do we take this
opportunity to come together and raise the bar and decisively move to
transform our nation's energy economy? The Advanced Energy Initiative is
a commitment to the latter course and the Department of Energy is
inspired by that which you already know, that no one every profited by
betting against the long-term prospects of the United States of America.

The price signals and the robust rates of return, make clear that this
is the time and this is an industry that warrants bullish optimism and
the investment and commitment to transformation that it is presently
attracting. It's still very early for renewable energy\'s inevitable
evolution towards critical mass and so we must be mindful that we are
seeking to navigate new and uncharted horizons. To state the obvious,
renewable energy sources and technologies themselves, have intrinsic
characteristics that distinguish them from conventional turbines,
boilers, engines and conventional carbon based energy sources. Even as
we continue to research and strive towards ever-greater output
efficiencies in the laboratories, it is important that we induce
comparable evolution and progress in commercial and contractual
frameworks and improved business models that will grow clean energy's
market share. The full value of capital intensive, renewable energy
capacity, should be realized through its financing and this means
reliably accounting for the out years of project life cycle costs.

Presently, the debt markets for project finance are deficient in this
regard, making transactions and the marketplace as a whole, more heavily
dependent on equity products and the higher rates of return they demand.
To a large extent, this is natural and part of the process of gaining
access to capital. But we should aspire towards greater consistency and
equilibrium in both risk and returns, so that capital flows may
eventually become more regularized and stable and predictable.

Title 17 of the [Energy Police Act of 2005]{.underline}, signed into law
by President Bush, authorized loan guarantees for this very purpose. And
we are quite ambitious to prudently and effectively implement this
policy tool. In doing so, we are guided by the need to structure and
scale renewable energy projects to be commercially viable and
replicable; to achieve competitive end pricing and to minimize excessive
exposure to the taxpayers. We like to frame it this way, the economic,
the technology and the opportunity that we've all been discussing over
the course of these meetings is definitely on our side. Unfortunately,
time is not. And so, we are compelled to act with urgency and to use the
months ahead to build a durable policy foundation for consistent growth
in advancing renewable energy.

Together, our efforts to transform our energy economy is a bellwether of
what can be and the world is watching and waiting and will ultimately
bear witness to our growth and direction. And that is why to advance
renewable energy, we must not only in the months ahead do things right,
but for the sake of future generations we commit ourselves now, to doing
the right thing.

We know that this is what motivates so many of you to come to this
conference and be our partners and the Department of Energy is grateful
for your efforts and partnership. Decisions about fuel choices and large
scale generation made today, factoring in your evolving work, will
endure for at least a half a century. And it is fundamental that your
objectives not be narrowly defined and that your corporate leadership
have a comparably durable vision.

If you take away just this one thought, I hope it is this, that
profitability is the key to sustainability. National prosperity and
economic growth are to our country, a bit like personal health is to you
and me, we need it to survive. The more of it we have, the better off we
are, but it is not the reason we exist. We all have a purpose here and
something to contribute to our energy future and this Nation has a
greater purpose than its prosperity alone, can attest to. The diversity
of talent and interest in this room speaks volumes about that which
binds us. People of all parties, people of all professions, should
contribute their talent to realizing the goals of the Advanced Energy
Initiative and embrace the President's call to come together now and
make this land we love more secure, more efficient, more competitive,
more lean and clean and green, and in doing so, we can be an ever
greater economic and environmental example to the world and elevate
renewable energy to the more prominent role it deserves in the future of
the heartland and in the realization of our national aspirations.

Thank you all so much for being here, and thank you for helping to make
it happen.

**CONCLUSION: MR. SWISHER**

If you talk to Andy's staff, he's one of these idea a minute guys. We've
been trying to figure out if there is some way that we can harness that
personal energy, as some sort of new renewable resource, but haven't
figured out quite how to do that. Now we're going to hear from our other
lead agency.