just given a check check one two three four five six seven eight twenty three eighteen raeburn change one two three four good go vote as quickly as we can come right back and being immediately after this vote i apologize for the interruption but appreciate the patience of our witnesses and others present so we hope to perhaps with luck get started by as early with ten one fifteen so don't go too far thanks be heard mr inglis is coming and i had to pause and i know you hate to miss opening statements them today being so important today's hearing will explore research and development needs for both wind and solar energy technologies the u s has great potential for expanding the use of both  renewable energy resources according to a study by the pacific northwest national laboratory excessively when potential in just twelve states could power the entire country twice over lawrence berkeley national lab is also shown that if we cover just one quarter of one percent of a total us land area with currently available solar panels we could meet all of our nation's energy needs in order to realize this potential however considerable investments are required we need significant upgrade to our transmission grid and to move beyond fossil fuels that address the growing threat of climate  disruption overheating and ocean acidification these domestic energy options must receive additional support wind and solar technologies have progressed over the last several decades to a point where cost competitiveness with fossil fuels is considered achievable and pa toward this goal can be laid out in detail today we will hear from an excellent panel of witnesses on the concrete steps government and the private sector can take to overcome the technical and economic barriers that wind and solar still face in the u s we will also receive testimony on h thirty one sixty five the wind energy research and development act of two thousand and nine the bill was recently introduced by a friend and colleague mr tomko to establish a more comprehensive research development a demonstration program at the department of energy i believe this bill goes a long way towards helping w power reach its full potential thank you what this is for appearing before the subcommittee is afternoon and with that i recognize our distinguished ranking member mr inglis thank you mr chairman and thank you for holding this hearing south carolina like much of the country is suffering in this  economic downturn our unemployment rate is at an all time high of twelve point one percent thankfully though general electric's turbine facility is helping to cushion the impact in the upstate of south carolina where about fifteen hundred engineers and fifteen hundred production employees are designing and building wind turbines in advance gas turbines doubling worldwide production of wind energy will generate one hundred billion dollars in sales for the wind industry so i'm very excited about improving the domestic wind energy industry the u s was an early leader in photo vitaly power in large part due to our robust space technology  government policy and strong market signals have since increased solar energy installation in manufacturing capacity in other nations and we have fallen behind american companies are ways though to reclaim leaders leadership in renewable energy technology and revitalize our economy through innovation well focused research dollars can support long term research to keep us ahead of the development curve and can spur opportunity and growth in the private sector nubile electricity industry faces a number of important research topics wind energy in particular will improve through when forecasting capacities increased turbine efficiency and reduced capital costs all of which will make wind farms easier to sight and cheaper to build and operate both wind and solar energy face a hurdle in terms of reliability energy storage systems to convert intermittent renewable capacity into baseload power source will be necessary to move beyond our dependence on fossil fuel energy once you address these obstacles we are still left with the aging and inefficient electricity grid geared to centralize generation and conventional power plants i'm glad we'll have a chance to  dress to address that critical challenge in our next step committee hearing looking forward to hearing from these witnesses mr chairman about ways to reshape and properly focus our renewable energy research dollars now thank you again for holding hearing i thank the chair if there are other members who wish to thank mr inglis if there are other members who wish to submit additional opening statements your statements will be added to the record at this point it's my pleasure to introduce our witnesses at this time mr steve lockhart a c e o of t is nancy bacon a famous name in science francis bacon of course would be apt to quote to put up on one side of the other probably that side would be safer as a senior advisor for united solar robotic an energy can surgeon devices incorporated i will at this point yield to my distinguished colleague mr taco to introduce our witness from albany new york thank you mr chair it's a pleasure to introduce a constituent from the capital region of new york john st cross john  the program manager of energy and environmental markets at new york state's energy research and development authority or nicer to he's currently responsible for managing the centralized procurement of renewable resources under the renewable portfolio standard in new york and the options in sales of allowances under the regional greenhouse gas initiative and clean air interstate rule programs mr st cross is a member of the new york state's nuclear assessment and evaluation team which is responsible for conducting evaluations of physical reactor plant conditions and plant personnel responses to unusual or emergency reactor another plant system of vents the for assuming these current responsibilities that nicer to john manage various renewable technology product development and deployment activities including those associated with the development of green power markets he was the director of resource portfolio management for green mountain power corporation where his responsibilities included the development of renewable and distributed power technologies integrated generation in demand planning and power contracting delivery and trading he also led the effort working with electric power research institute and the department of energy to develop one of the nation's first utility owned wind projects but the testing of large scale pre commercial turbans located in tonto i will yield to our other colleague mr neugebauer to introduce his fellow texan and the final witness well thank you mr chairman it's my honor to be able to introduce a great educator researcher and leader in science and engineering dr andy swift is the director of the when science and engineering research center at texas tech which is home to america's only dr oriel granting program and when science engineering located in my district as well his previous employment included more than twenty years as professor of mechanical engineering a paso university of texas el paso the last seven of which was the dean of the college of engineering he completed his engineering graduate work obtaining a dr of science degree at washington university in st louis where he began conducting research in winter been engineering with a focus on dynamics in aerodynamics a wind turbine rotors doctors with has working with injured energy for over twenty five years and has over one hundred published articles and books chapters in the area wind turbine engineering renewable energy and in hundred ninety five he received american win energy society academic award for continuing contributions to win energy technology as teacher researcher and author it's my privilege to welcome a true pioneer in renewal energy and recognize leader in the inter nation and you know they hired her because she can bring the bacon home and so we're pleased to have her here to thank you thank you dr elders we also have miss edwards  outstanding members of the committee as well thank you for being here and without us our witnesses should know you will have five minutes for your spoken testimony please do your best to keep around that we try to be fairly rigorous on that written test one it will be included in the record for the hearing when you have completed your spoken test i will begin with questions each member will have five minutes to question the witnesses after that point we'll start with them mr lockhart good afternoon chairman ranking member endless distinguished members of this subcommittee i appreciate the opportunity to testify before you today our company t p i composites is a manufacturer of large wind turbine blades for leading turban makers including g e and mitsubishi were headquartered in scottsdale arizona  operates wind related factories in rhode island mexico china and most recently newton iowa in addition to my role with i also co chair of the r and d committee for the american wind energy association on whose behalf on testifying today before proceeding i would like to thank congressman taco for sponsoring legislation to authorize a comprehensive research development and demonstration program for wind energy indorse this legislation and urge members to support its passage representative taco's legislation authorizes wind energy r and d at a level that will allow the wind industry to significantly improve turban reliability and reduce capital costs combined with a strong national electricity standard and broader transmission cost allocation planning and siting policies greater r and d funding will increase wind energy production and lead to the creation of more high paying jobs across our country last year at a time when most u s industries were shedding jobs the wind industry added thirty five thousand jobs and deployed over eighty five hundred megawatts this record growth amounted to more than forty percent of the country's new electric generating capacity in that year however our job is far from complete power still constrained by difficulties in market acceptance and needed improvements in cost performance and reliability the seventy million dollars approved by the house appropriations committee for wind energy energy r and b combined with funds will be provided through the american recovery and reinvestment act will finance a number of key wind industry priorities however in order to fully address all of the key wind energy r and d and deployment challenges and annual budget of at least two hundred million dollars is needed the department of energy's twenty percent by two thousand and thirty one report was released in two thousand and eight the report assumes the capital cost be decreased by ten percent and turban efficiency increased by fifteen percent to reach this achievable goal of providing twenty percent of our nation's electricity from wind meeting this goal will require increased  d funding meaning the twenty percent goal will provide a host of benefits including supporting five hundred thousand jobs and generating over one trillion dollars in economic impact by two thousand and thirty decreasing natural gas prices by approximately twelve percent of what an eight hundred twenty five million tons of c o two emissions in twenty thirty equivalent to twenty five percent of the electric sector emissions and reduce cumulative water consumption in the electric sector by seventeen percent in two thousand and thirty increased r and d funding will bring down capital costs and increase turban efficiency to help realize these benefits and keep america's wind industry competitive with electric generation sources and the wind industries of other countries last year as part of an a we r and d committee effort a team of over eighty we have members and advisers from industry government and academic institutions worked over several months to develop a specific action plan and funding proposal to meet our twenty percent goal participants determined that two hundred seventeen million dollars in annual federal funding combined with two hundred twenty four million in annual action plan we also recognizes the need to reduce the cost of offshore energy offshore wind energy technology to provide an estimated fifty four gigawatts of the three hundred megawatts needed to meet the twenty percent goal by tw thirty we are recommends funding for programs that focus on the power operations issues of integrating variable power sources such as when into the electric grid an important component of such integration includes developing and promoting advanced forecasting methods and other important research projects including better understanding the impact of wind turbines on wildlife and radar installations and mitigating these impacts while the wind industry has continued to add new electric generation capacity a number of challenges still exist continued support for wind energy r and d is vital to helping wind become a more prominent energy source that leads to a host of benefits again for the opportunity to testify welcome any questions  partnering with businesses industries and residents to invest in innovative environmentally friendly renewable energy energy efficient technologies its annual budget of approximately six hundred million dollars is funded through multiple sources currently administers  system of benefits charge based on a small surcharge on utility bills which is allocated toward energy efficiency programs and r and d development initiatives funding from the renewable portfolio standard r p s is also a critical part of what we do to lessen our heavy dependence in new york on fossil fuels and reduce harmful emissions in addition by short it expects to realize additional funding for related research his participation in the regional greenhouse gas initiative carbon cap and trade program  also be implementing governor paterson's forty five by fifteen initiative the most ambitious clean energy program in the nation which requires that by two thousand and fifteen thirty percent of new york's energy will be supplied by renewable resources and fifteen percent  by sort of commands this committee for taking up the issue of when technology performance and improvement to applied in transformational research and demonstration by sword is here today to speak to the promise of wind energy and related technology challenges from two perspectives the first as a user of the a competitive basis a generation of electric energy from qualified renewable resources such as wind power out of the state's installed wind generation of one thousand two hundred seventy five megawatts about one thousand one hundred megawatts are supported through the  by the end of two thousand and nine the state is expected to thirty percent of its renewable energy targets when energy represents over ninety percent of the energy of this program the state of new york is counting on wind project performance and reliability to satisfy challenges other technologies face scientific research and analysis progressing to product a material development demonstration and validation analysis of commercial feasibility and ultimately to operating practices and codes remains a continuum of integrated activities is the longest continue to makes its home is committed to working with the private sector institutions of higher learning and the federal government to characterize challenges along this continuum and collaborating were appropriate to overcome them offshore such benefits will only grow for offshore applications current when fluid dynamics modeling need to be expanded the simulation of water in wave motion turbans can be designed accordingly and operate reliably advances in the developed of energy storage technologies  director of the win science and engineering research center at texas tech university in lubbock texas and the center is been in existence for almost forty years i've been doing when research for about thirty myself and texas ranks first wind power install capacity and in lubbock we're at the geographic epicenter of that development in texas and of course it expands through the southern great plains region when is the fastest growing source of bulk collective power  both the united states and the world and it's a clean domestic renewable source of energy and it uses no water most thermal power plants use a lot of water and i know there have been some committee hearings here before this committee talking about the relationship between energy and water that's an important fact i think if we look about dispersion of wind through the great plains where water can be scarce good review of the deal or the department of energy twenty percent by two thousand and thirty report and we're at about twenty eight gigawatts of installed capacity that report calls for three hundred gigawatts of needed capacity and also talks about the not only the need for transmission but also the need for reduced cost and improved performance reliability of when turbans and about workforce i'd like to use my last few minutes here to comment on these on the research for turban reliability and performance is really two areas and i compliment congressman tom cole for his bill for distinguishing between those two individual turban research which needs to be done in order to improve com ponens to talk about improved rotors and to prove generators and blades there is a lot of work that can be done and those various areas will combine together to provide individual turban performance enhancement the second area which is the development part of the bill really addresses the array of facts of wind turbines one of the issues for research is that services are put into large wind farms that down turbans the ones that are in the second third fourth row typically don't perform as well as those in the front row and this is an issue because researchers and folks at the labs etc our students cannot get access to these terms because they're all privately held and privately owned so there's a huge need for a public access to wind farms in order to begin to look at these wake affects in these array of facts let me talk about the two hundred million dollars it's been proposed a year it's a lot of money it's a healthy increase but it's a needed increase it brings wind on a parity i think with some of the other resources solar has been pretty close to that range for a number of years if one were to look at that as an investment take an investment approach the twenty thirty report by deal we calls for about fifteen gigawatts per year in order to reach that goal if one takes that fifteen gigawatts and implies a one percent informant's improvement that's all just one percent of that fifteen gigawatts due to this research and then take that over the life of the wind farm net present value that is about three hundred million dollars given the current cost and with some assumptions i have those calculations available if anyone's interested my point is that the leverage of those dollars is significant and it's because of the huge amount of energy produced from these large wind farms and the value of that energy  like take my last minute talk about workforce needs in the dealing twenty thirty report they talk about one hundred eighty thousand direct jobs that are going to be needed we've had some economists at texas tech take a look at these numbers and we estimate that about twenty to twenty five thousand of those jobs will be professional jobs which require some kind of university education the rest will require two year degree and maintenance and oversight of these wind farms and that efforts going on as i say mostly the two year schools at the university as congressman doug are pointed out we are the only ph d program and when science and engineering something we're proud of but if we're going to have this kind of development we need programs across this country  texas tech is not going to lead this development all by itself a number of universities we're stepping up but in order to make this happen we need to get faculty involved in research dollars bring faculty faculty bring graduate students who graduate energy prices collation challenges in response we are quite likely to deploy many billions even trillions of dollars worth of renewables including solar this is the path to europe and japan appear to be on and of all the future paths it seems to me the most likely for us and in my opinion is by far the most sustainable sensible and even most affordable we should ensure that our deployment expectations of these trillions of dollars are supported by technological progress to keep our costs to a minimum this is especially true of solar where current costs are higher than other renewables but potential for cost reductions are faster and greater and the payoff is greatest because solar is a largest and most widely available energy source on the planet much larger than fossil fuels in fact i suggest the combined deployment of solar and my respected wind colleagues and electric transportation will i will address our problems successfully if we can solve our energy problems with solar and wind and electric transportation they will be solved for a long time to come if we do not try to connect our solar technology development and government with our deployment expectations we will be doing ourselves a disservice paying more and perhaps much more than we should for the same electricity in addition we have the response ability to maximize our domestic competitiveness since solar can provide a huge harvest of jobs our suite of solar technologies is exceptionally rich and with the proper support should reach cost levels appropriate for development deployments sufficient to stabilize energy prices and reduce greenhouse gas emissions that means we do not need any breakthroughs we have all the technology we need to be able to meet greenhouse gas and energy energy price stabilisation we are in danger of losing technically leadership in these technologies if we hesitate to support them misled by claims about futuristic technologies with poor risk profiles i worked twenty five years on solar p v technology development and had the good fortune to be involved with a small deal we program of five to fifteen million dollars during that period substantial participants in this program both are now world leaders in fact first solar was the second largest manufacturer of p v modules in the world last year when the numbers come in this year they may be the largest with over a billion wat module sales and two billion dollars in revenue this is a notable success in a world dominated by foreign even chinese competitors low cost labor as their competitive advantage in this case technology technolog competitive advantage and we'd like to keep it that way we can learn some lessons from the history of first solar which was intimately involved with the funding from the apartment of energy during their period of nurturing since one thousand nine hundred ninety i want to make a the corporate ups and downs because we had a technical roadmap based on three critical criteria module cost performance and reliability the same criteria are mostly the criteria we all use in everyday matters cost performance and reliability they're pretty much universal we support we were not lost in a technical technological woods assuming everything equally worthy of support or jumping from one hot new idea to another we knew what we needed in a way of manufacturing cost in the wave of the output in the way of reliability for thirty year life knowing where we were going a lot of stick with technologies through thick and thin and drop those that demonstrated ability to get there with reasonable risk and cost we exercise technically knowledgeable judgment and we got to our goals today first solar has suppressed all our metrics and they are now the lowest cost producer of solar p v electricity in the world they have become a huge  progress in solar energy because they are the new benchmark against which everyone is measured we are fortunate because with this competition prices will be dropping instead of being static the way they were before they're your who was part of this development during this whole period technical roadmaps are not magic they were well known pitfalls like being too narrowly not allowing enough out of the box thinking and being parochial but they're also wonderful  assuring us research focus and highlighting pinch points used wisely they can be a major step forward put differently without them we are in danger of wandering in the woods from one hot one hot excitement to another or treating every proposal as of equal thank you mr chairman and all the distinguished members of the committee very much appreciate being here it is an honor and nancy bacon of course senior advisor of a company in michigan which is energy conversion devices  our products are significantly different from the other conventional products there are typically eighteen feet long and fourteen inches wide they contain glass which makes them flexible durable and extremely lightweight perfect for v rooftop installations in fact our products were chosen to do the largest photovoltaic array in the world on a rooftop of in spain with general motors given a handout to the  staff earlier and you'll see that picture page six to make our united solar laminates we employ about two thousand people most of them in michigan since two thousand and six united has increased its michigan employment base for full we operate two plants in auburn hills michigan two in greenville michigan and we are continuing to expand and we're constructing a fifth plant in battle creek where one of the few u s producers  we have a history of innovation we pioneered the use of roll to roll processing for depositing solar cells in one and a half mile long substrates we're very interested in the road map process and we very much applaud the committee commitment to solar energy and support to deal with these solar photovoltaic programs we also believe that strengthening the government industry partnership to develop a robust solar power roadmap or solar vision to guide the u research development demonstration and commercial application would be of great value such a program properly funded would address the national priorities affectively of addressing climate change enhanced u s competitiveness in energy security we are competing against countries not companies bell labs invented photovoltaic fifty four years ago less than a decade ago we had forty percent of the world's p v manufacturing here in the u s today it is only about eight percent we need to put the nation scientific engineering and innovation talents to work to bring down the cost of solar power in revitalize our when you factor in bass other countries have visionary policies and making investments that are creating thousands of jobs and we need to do that as well wide spread use of solar p v can benefit the climate the economy and our security while addressing the supply side i think is critical we also need as a nation to address the demand side in particular we believe that the government should lead by example and install pv roasts on several brick buildings and encourage states to do the same before offering some specific suggestions i would like to highlight some of the benefits of using solar photovoltaic for distributed generation to put some of my recommendations in context so we're rooftops are an ideal place to generate electricity well knows distributed generation simply refers to the generation of electricity at the point of consumption rather than on a more remote location mind my written testimony the benefits of riveted generation are numerous and they include better land utilization reduce strain on our antiquated electrical grid no transmission or just in losses less reliance on foreign oil and a drop in carbon dioxide production that's five significant benefits in one if you think about it rooftops are an ideal place to install photovoltaic they have no other purpose but to keep the building dry inside my written testimony outlines my recommendations and i'd like to highlight a few today solar vision roadmap should be properly funded to assure the u s industry achieves grid parity and the u s is competitive with other countries installed cost per system and the amount of electricity generated in real world conditions benefits a distributed generation should also been taken into account no land no transmission and distribution losses et c and we should also take into account the benefits of solar during peak times health benefits and energy security benefits are also important if we fund a vigorous program to develop advance manufacturing technology i believe this will be critical for the u s to help revitalize its manufacturing base and regain leadership in this important field and this funding should be given priority as well finally i think that the taxpayers investment should be protected with provisions to ensure technology is developed with taxpayers money is implemented here in the u s mistaken i'm going to ask you to reach conclusions right now and i certainly will thank you  last recommendation i have is really with regard to the demand side the federal government spends six billion dollars annually on electricity i think they should lead by example and they could be putting a procurement program in place that would change the way we create electricity just the way we changed the way with with the government funding the way we communicate with the internet i think it's critical to success that we move ahead with these programs and a timely implementation in deployment can have us regain our leadership once again i'll ask you to conclude at that point and without question thank you so much i apologize to the witnesses it's always difficult you have tremendous expertise i'm so sorry to hear this testimony about the tremendous job loss being created by this industry we recently passed on comprehensive energy bill as you know and one of the criticisms of it is that it will be catastrophic from an employment and an economic perspective that is not what i've been hearing from the testimony today would any of you like to comment on that briefly mr lockhart you had some impressive statistics and others wish to comment would welcome that yeah think two thousand and eight represented a terrific year for the win that history in the u s with tremendous growth eighty five hundred megawatts job creation two thousand and nine is not going to reflect that same growth by the way so just so just so that stat is clear and  things like a federal federal reserve electricity standard will send a much stronger consistent long term signal that's an important piece of this in order for companies like ours and others to build more plants create jobs and create sustainable long term jobs not just the boom bah boom bust cycles that we've had up until now so while there's a lot of enthusiasm and tremendous opportunity our job isn't done here and i think there are several key issues opportunities including the federal  two thousand and six and we're making excellent progress and that's going very well the problem is that we have now with the recession and with a number of problems with regard to the finance institutions things are slowing plant that's under construction we have put a hold on some of the equipment until things turn around from a point of view of where we are from the nation we export eighty percent of our products and as i talked about the general motors twelve megawatt the largest in the world we created jobs in michigan by manufacturing the solar laminates but we created more jobs over in spain with the installers and the electricians and the construction folks so i think some of these things to look at the supplies will be very important here and to move these programs along timely will be also very important thank you but you'll be pleased to know that the chair of the transportation and infrastructure committee has made it a passionate pursuit to install solar and other technologies on many federal buildings i understand that and i actually testified in that committee as well and we were delighted to get a lot of things in the bill the problem is that hasn't come out of  i'd like to pursue relates to an article in this month's the harvard business review and to all my colleagues i would really commend this article it's in the harvard business review and it discusses what happens when u s core fundamental research technology get shifted overseas and we fall off that that supply and engineering train is directly relevant to your work in the traces back from everything from the transistor to battery technology etc and i think it's got the potential we're seeing it already in renewable energy and so the question is how can we not see that happen here one of the points this article made was as domestic manufacturers allow battery technology for cell phones to go overseas that seem like so what they can do it ok but now if we want batteries for automobiles we don't have the technology to know how the manufacturing capacity here they have it overseas how can we avoid that and i will be asking that in this committee for probably many many months to come up different similar panels how do we avoid that in the area of renewable energies so i can take a crack at that as well it's a little controversial but as a taxpayer i feel that if my money goes into investment in developing research  research and development advanced technologies and so on when my government buys products i would like to see a preference for u s industry and i also think an advanced manufacturing technology which is critical to revitalize our manufacturing base here in the u s with regard to photovoltaics the dollars that go there we should see that those plants are put here and the other side of it is creating the demand side again that makes a difference germany is the largest market in the than we have in michigan and they employ more people in renewable energy now than they do in the automotive industry and think it's the home of the mercedes in the v w and so on and that's because of their policies and it's both on the supply and on the demand side with this and i think those kind of policies will make all the difference in the world so we don't see this go the way of the v c r i'll be providing a copy of that article and my colleagues it's a profoundly solar farms and you don't have the land you don't have the transmission distribution which is like six to eight percent you don't have to wait for the smart grid antiquated all those advantages with that but solar in general the reason we're all here is we're not to grid parity yet but we really think it's the future there is going to be there was a deal study that just came out that they think that solar could be fifty percent building integrated photovoltaics and the next time you go into an airport just look at all those roughs that you can put solar on they can be done in any size but the problem in industry as general is we're not to grid parity hence we need the stimulus whether it's procurement via direct payment already competitive but these are twenty twenty five year lives and to find out really competitive you need your crystal ball to figure out what's the electricity going to be five years from now ten years from now you'll appreciate i had president out called me solar woman but i asked him the same thing he asked me about the competitiveness and i asked him i said what do you think the price of electricity is going to be in five years ten years fifteen years and he gave me one of those blank considerably higher than it is and therefore they make the economic decision or they make some sort of other considerations go into their decision and your product most of them are much tougher than that most of them want to have the price today at the same price as the grid and then there will be an escalation a lot of the industry is now being done with power purchase agreements where somebody else buys the power like a financier he takes all the  epreciation except and then he has a twenty twenty five power purchase agreement general motors is a good example we have a one megawatt installation in california there are initial price started out at twelve cents a kilowatt hour and then it escalates each year a certain percentage they're all banking on what that's going to be but that initial price was pretty close to what the parity was at that point in time but the only reason that worked was because of the incentives easier to sell megawatt or a twelve megawatt of what we will be coming out with the end of this year program for small households and they can also be cost effective in the long term and i believe in the long term i'm old up the electricity right where you need it so there's a lot of innovation here both from the basic materials the product design manufacturing and even the financing and marketing mechanisms and that's why i applaud some of the things that people are looking at a vision and roadmap it's not just looking at efficiencies to have technical papers it's looking at the whole program to be cost effective and really have the energy security climate and potential just for the wind portion of our energy supplies but really expanding the opportunities for renewables in general can you cite what sort the total twenty percent number would be offshore it was also viewed to be a bit later in the twenty two year cycle so the problems today are cost sighting related similar to land based but probably magnified in terms of the cost problem and the siting problem there's probably more of an opportunity in offshore for innovation to drive a breakthrough change whereas the land based product it seems is pretty much dialed in the improvements are cost performance reliability probably not breakthrough i think the breakthrough opportunities may extend themselves even better in in the offshore side so in our funding the two hundred seventy million dollars request that was related offshore specific technology other pools as well would go toward offshore i think our group is growing in the view that offshore should represent can represent a significant part of the wind future to clearly new england and the gulf coast and it should be an important source of innovation discover a more efficient alternative for for that portion of went to work you're going to need to put many towers up if you're going to try to  turban operate that becomes very costly for the development community i think new jersey has put its own money on the table to do that i know that in new york we are considering a program element going down the road  respective of generating energy energy is well their lifetime can they survive those conditions loading at the resources one part on blades and other components but those are very very critical pieces that are necessary if you're really going to see an offshore vision and that's a very very high cost high risk enterprise for a developer to come in and take on those are the kinds of things that the federal government leveraging with state funding i think is a is a better space for us to play  technologies we've talked about air mounted technology to scan and look at resource but there is also the lifetime issue the gulf is a lot of hurricanes great wind resource but the extreme events a lot of the people in our cent do a lot of work on hurricane research and investigation people think the wind is just a uniform front of when the wind is the wind it's very complex there's a lot of structure embedded and we have to understand these things better if we really want to make these kind of investments and make sure they can survive the environment thank you and as you can see from the testimony in the comments that once again michigan has the best answer or arizona build a big facility put to put the energy into the grid and that this is the way to go i don't think it is as mr sweater mentioned about solar energy it's very constantly and a lot of people worry about clubs but solar energy can work through the clouds too maybe not as efficiently but where but the difficulty with solar energy there are two problems one it is very diffuse so it's all over the earth it's not localized and second problem is that it is of low quality which means it's low temperature now you can get rid of the low temperature problem by using solar  panels because you're converting energy directly into electrical energy converting light energy directly into the diffuse factor i think is best handled by making certain that and this is my dream for this country and stop worrying about paving over or over nevada to collect the solar energy i think this is the direction in which we have to go whether or not we can conquer that the cost problem i don't know but i know as long as we're doing research and we're keep trying we're likely to get there i think the single biggest problem for both our is the one that mr krause referred to earlier and that's a storage problem he referred to batteries  are very problematic it's they're they're expensive they're heavy they don't last that long unless you're going to the deep discharge they're not terribly efficient so maybe batteries are the answer but we have an immense amount of research to do but what i've said for thirty years what this world needs is a good efficient means of storing electrical energy and if you do that solar energy and when the energy and other forms of energy become much more new york and we it is diffuse we have a large residential program but the market is not really in terms of funding it's not a significant duration or scale for us in new york to drive the kind of cost reduction that we need so we're providing about three dollars a watt as an incentive against the other federal and state tax credits to bring that market to bear on storage i didn't mention the battery storage most of the work we're doing now is related to transportation but if we look at the offshore picture and we look at things like smart grid we look at residential based storage mediums or even plug in hybrid vehicles to go to that again that's still not still batteries but i think and that's a concern now i know a lot of the members don't have time to actually read everything in our packets but it's really important to look through what happened the story what happened in the one nine hundred eighty s when the d o d became concerned about the japanese semiconductor industry in the about the plan basically briefly how it works for the semiconductor industry more important whether or not that roadmap plan good idea for solar and what that could possibly do for us very scale to meet greenhouse gas emission issues energy stabilization so we have a mission now that's very clear and we have a set of technologies that are excellent that are capable of meeting that mission so it's time for us to get serious about technical plan a roadmap that can be capable of supporting those successful goals so whether or not it's semiconductor analog basically needs to be a focused plan with a clear goal successfully being able to reduce the cost of solar energy and i want to take a moment to say that there's been tremendous progress in the reduction  solar energy that wasn't that obvious during a period of boom when prices were rising but in fact are now becoming obvious now the man worldwide is hurt by the financial recession so the solar energy prices level are dropping and have dropped in the last twelve months in the next twelve months by about thirty percent from about a year ago systems that used to be going in a five to six dollars a wat now going in four dollars a watt and systems are being talked about three dollars a watt there's a substantial amount of progress technologically we have the opportunity to take those three and four dollar a day and bring them down to two dollars a watt and i might say that two to three dollars a watt those systems are going to be quite competitive with say for example offshore wind which is another very large source produces only seven percent so i guess we are more liberal back then about putting in dams and we would like to be now about putting in solar energy so i suggest we can have it all we can have rooftops and we can also have large fields  coordination and the right direction for us to be able to move ahead getting to grid parity with photovoltaics without any subsidies and that's really what our goal is as a company and we have a i mentioned they could change the way that we create electricity just like they change the way we communicate with the internet it would have a mass of impact on the whole solar industry and i think we need that roadmap we need to make sure that plant or sixty percent of what the consumer cares about is what's my sense kilowatt hours we need to look at all of this we need i think a neutral party that can really look through this help us with the direction it's time with the energy security benefits the climate benefits the economic benefits the health benefits as i mentioned because of what we're dealing with in terms of air pollution from the climate  not only to look at the efficiency of the turbans the devices i guess it would be but also to look at the research of making sure that the wind farms in the configurations and then all of those things are equally  least one and probably several national research wind farms in order to address this issue pointed out these are a affects there are citing issues there is modeling that needs to be done the tools that we have available right now just do not give the optimum performance the optimum loads which is related to life time which relates in to dollars and if we can address this issue i gave that one investment example just a one percent improvement in performance is something like three hundred million dollars a year given the rate that we're deploying these turbaned so at least one national wind farm where it would be publicly accessible data researchers from across the country could do this and i say we probably need more than one because there are different regions of the country where the wind is different i will point out another thing that this industry has grown really  ways we have an atmospheric science community we have a wind power community there's an opportunity for these two to come together and work in ways that they haven't and part of it's just history atmospheric science you have a lot of scientists who look at  and then we can keep hearing go and so i think you'll be up next on our side if you want we've got about ten minutes ago so we'll settle our continue with your question ms edwards and then when others come back we'll cycle back the test platforms test urban's arrays of turbans we have a new blood test facility coming funded now we have a new dynamometer that's being proposed and funded all those platforms and the wind industry has been described to me as kind of like the automotive industry in the one nine hundred forty s it's one thing for us all to look at it and say seventeen billion dollars worth of business in two thousand and eight the job's done and that's that's not the case so whether it's forecasting the reliability conditions the things we're talking about are kind bottoms up technical experts looking at the work saying we've got to ratchet this industry ought to be something that's really going to stand the test of time and i'd echo that comment across the whole range of issues forecasting and and others i think one of the things that i heard many of you saying i think is something that all of us struggle with during the debate on energy and is you know making it a standalone buyable industry without having to have additional incentives point parity with the say natural gas or coal or nuclear because those are the those are the technologies that are available and usable today i mean how are we closing that gap or are we looking at long term need to subsidize those differences i guess a couple of comments one is all the electric energy technologies are subsidized today so part of this is i think it needs to be looked in that larger context but that twenty percent by two thousand and thirty report required a ten percent reduction in cost fifteen percent improvement in performance if you combine those you can think about what kind of twenty five percent away from what might be necessary to be a parity that's not very far away but yet scale doesn't necessarily drive costs a lot of our costs are raw material costs and otherwise in the industry are going up u s manufacturing is more expensive so there needs to be innovation to drive more automation a couple of things one is that i usually compare solar and wind against other nonce two sources because that helps the focus that the externalities are about in most cases energy independence and on c o two and both of them have it so i don't really compare with unless of sequester all of us are attempting to bring down cost and with a history of cost reduction in solar energy we can be confident that we're going to continue to bring the cost down proximately twenty percent every doubling  worldwide production that's been the history in fact new technologies that have come on have actually cost reduction so we have every intention of doing that but for technologies like wind and solar that don't use fuel they're not exposed to the cost escalation issue and so that moving target issue and over the course of their real life time and i've heard that almost every plant that was ever put in the united states to make electricity is still in actual use because they re permit over the course of those long life times because solar and wind have no fuel their costs become very tiny once you've paid off the capital cost so actually you can actually come to a calculation that even at today's prices they're cheaper partnership going back with as well as other things that we do in solar america on the deployment side then you've got all the things that are the balance of systems because you've got to look at everything just the solar module doesn't do you any good you've got to have the  all the electronics and a good way to install it and all the way through so i think that's what the roadmap can do because there is no one company that has every piece of that supply chain mistake and i'm going to interrupt you because i want to  see i mean most people i know when they flip on the light switch they don't ask where does my power come from they don't care they just want to be as cheap and affordable as possible and for the lights to come on and so i have a question about that relates to this  question around transmission debate that's going on you know reported in today's new york times the western states and the eastern states and what's commercialized and who's transmitting and i wonder why there isn't more discussion about decentralizing the transmission system localizing it so that you have the potential to you know to use maybe limited sources of  generation that may be a mix of different things in a community and produce and transmit and store locally but it seems to me that all of our policy discussions involve this  your responses to that sounds like it was almost a planted question for me because i love how but good to me i love distributed generation it just makes sense we put photovoltaics on rooftops why not use generate the power right where you're going to use it you don't have the land you don't have the infrastructure you don't have the transmission and distribution losses now it's solar we're blessed with being able to do that because the sun shines everywhere some places better than others when they have specific areas where the wind is much better so it makes more sense to do wind farms and then transmit it but i think the more that we can do that the better and the other point of this with regard to distributed generation you don't have to just put it on one rooftop you could also have distributed wind if you will or distributed solar that can handle a community and the other point  of it is you can do it now it's a medium i mean in the matter of months as opposed to waiting for all the infrastructure investments in the permitting and all the fight about it but i think in the long term there's going to be a mix between centralized with transmission and also distributed generation facilities proposed in our and the issue one of the issues is the regulatory agencies are telling us we just don't know the answers to some of the questions because it's a new technology especially regarding e s a issues and migra birds and things of that sort what are we where are we at in terms of learning what can be done to really reduce bird mortality and you know i remember years ago when the airlines discovered they can paint those little curlicues on jet engines and scare away birds didn't work in the hudson river case but apparently has been relatively successful what can we do what's the state of the regulatory issues and how do we expedite the permitting to get this technology online i think there is there's a lot of recognition in the industry from where i sit that these are issues that need to be addressed i think if you look at the twenty thirty roadmap and is the pointed out in his testimony that we want to reduce the impacts of large scale wind generation there are some new technologies we're looking at radar for measuring when inflow to turbans has been harping on this array effect issue but those same radar can also be looked to determine that and birds and things and some of the the new wind farms in the coastal area in texas actually have bird mitigation radar as a flocks of birds coming they can actually shut down the wind farm i think there is there is a lot of opportunity here as we go forward and work with the various ecological communities with the power people thank you for a quarter of a century now i've had solar p v and for the last couple of years i've had a sky stream and i was amazed that the sky stream produces as much electricity when the wind blows adequately as trifling percentages of our total energy storage doesn't matter but we will one day not have fossil fuels and so we will you produce in our energy in some alternative fashion so storage is going to become very important pump storage of course is very efficient and where you have the topography differences you can certainly do that but aside from that toward just you know thousands millions of batteries and hybrid cars and so forth i know of no silver bullet for storage and i wonder if we are moving as aggressively on the storage front as we are on the on the solar p v and the and the wind front there is of course  of course because the sun shines only in the daytime are you comfortable that we have adequate research investment in storage and have we taken a really good look at how  has wrestled with quite a bit the twenty percent by two thousand and thirty when report by the way interesting to me although i'm in support of cost effective storage technology development one thing it showed was that twenty percent of our nation's electricity can come from when without storage actually we were surprised at some of us to see that outcome and some of that has to do as you said with the build out of transmission and broadening the market control areas in the jurisdiction areas and whatnot for transmit so it's built out of transmission but also the planning and management of the broader areas and i think from our group's perspective cost effective storage is something that's interesting should be worked on not only for transportation applications but for megawatt scale storage and maybe our wind goal then becomes thirty or forty percent with cost effective storage as opposed to twenty i would like to say that we have the same kind of paradigm in solar that we discovered that we could do an awful lot of solar without straining the grid without storage but this doesn't mean we don't want storage because your vision or vision coincides that we need to have some way to store these intermittent for other times and so proper storage research program in parallel with the aggressive deployment of solar and wind i think is totally desirable and the good news is that might be in the right timeframe in other words even if it takes twenty years to develop best new kinds of storage will be ready we will need it all that much before then and will be ready at that time for using it so i think those kind of research programs really need to be done and should be done and we evening do not have problems in terms of any capacity problems whatsoever in the longer term we certainly do need to look at one of the other things as you know congressman we have done is our company also invented the nickel metal h battery which is the battery of choice for today's hybrid electric vehicles much work is being done with lithium because the plug in hybrids need a higher capacity we think we can also improve the nickel metal h batteries as well there can be a second life for these batteries after the car is done with them after about nine eight or nine years when they aren't good enough capacity for running a lot of places to reuse and recycle but having said that i think in the long term we're going to have to deal with storage and it's not just battery storage there are other mechanisms storage i don't think funding is sufficient now but there are choices that need to be made in our industry it's not holding our our expansion our cost reduction thank you thank you thank you dr barlow one of the major contributions dr ballard makes is he is probably more than any other member of congress off the grid in the sense of he has implemented this technology in his own home and provides very valuable insights in that everything from  bring it down to comparable to other sources of more traditional old fashioned energy well they are bringing it down but the reason germany is the biggest market in the world balance because of the policies that they have yes they have a which basically agrees for those of you that don't know it will buy the power created by the photovoltaic or a very high rates to make it feasible to be able to pay everybody from the module manufacturer to installer to the owner and the integrator in the finance right now i understand but i mean but but but since one of things that we always hear about i heard today is that obviously when you have more of it the price should go down because of technology and yet in germany it still is not to the point  my formative years living in spain and we've seen some success stories and some dismal failures in spain and with their with their energy policies they are now actually facing even some sporadic blackouts way too high and that it's not unusual mistake when programs are just starting because they don't know where to put the number they want to kickstart something so they got a huge influx of installed systems and that basically overwhelmed their  system and they did more than they wanted so then the second year they just cut back to zero and that kicked everybody off of the system so that instead of starting a domestic industry they made everybody go boom to bust in about a one and a half year cycle so it is good to tune your incentives to be a proper size so that you don't have that kind of process in fact one of the best things about these feed in tariffs is they go down every year so they incentivize the idea that you're going to have to improve every year and the kind of costs come down over the last ten years because of the unbelievable they're been fabulous so i'm very strongly in favor of the least cost to our society  provide all the daytime needs and they buy from the grid there are other cases that the customer wants size larger and they have net metering the run demeter runs backwards and they have hardly any bill at all we've also done mistake and i want to make sure we rohrabacher thank you very much mr chairman this has been a very fascinating hearing i've been in and out but i've caught most of it let me just note for the record the argument for about climate change has been used several times here those of us who think that global warming as the biggest hoax that's ever been played on human kind do not necessarily disagree with you about developing alternative energy resources i mean those of us who note that it's gotten colder for the last eight years and that c o two in the air is supposed to make it warmer thus anyway we don't want that but just so you'll know that those of us who reject that are committed to cleaner air and energy independence and what we're after and what's being advocated today fits right in to that strategy so let's look at this a little bit i'd like to ask you about open our net metering and an open grid and what is the relationship to work status today and parent i'm trying to this is where you can put into the grid and get credit for it and and then after pay for what you get out is that a status today in the united states some of the when colleagues might know better than i do but there are many places that have net metering there's a couple of ways they do it and they're in the state so it's up to the state to do it you and the in the evening and then the charge of the avoided cost which could be two cents a kilowatt hour which is great in some cases they charge you what they would normally have or they pay you if you will at a  in the end what you're advocating which is trying to focus on letting everybody contribute to the grid out of the grid is going to be the answer to giving people incentives in the electricity that they through nuclear power which nobody seems to have talked about here today and which seems to be some of the environmentalists who are talking about global warming never can get themselves to talk about nuclear energy as an alternative in terms of costs are we talking about nuclear power being more expensive than what solar power offers today and perhaps in the future or less expensive there are other what is what is the number of windmills that you would have to build for one same electricity as a nuclear power plant he says go ahead but i don't know what the answer is what i never know exactly so i'll keep going as well what i know is the average winter been today one point five megawatt turbine for example generates enough electricity when running for about three hundred four to four hundred metering digital meters do they run backwards the same way as the mechanical meters if they do if they do then you really don't need laws for net metering because you'd have to have a huge array to produce more electricity than you use so you don't need anybody's permission to have a wind machine or solar on your house and run your meter backwards if you run it backwards more than zero they may not pay you for that but in any event they can't stop you from running the meter backwards i don't think can they so if we don't really need net metering laws all you need do is put it on your roof and be careful you don't produce more electricity then you use your head of a huge array to do that opportunities if they want follow up questions as well i had asked a question about the export of technologies earlier and i want to follow up on that line bacon i'm a personal supporter of buy american provisions as you know there are profound trade implications and in your particular business given what you said earlier about the amount you export versus import there'd be a pretty interesting cost benefit question for you about that policy other on the win side my understanding is we did a lot of the us did a lot of the early work on wind and a lot of that's now been exploited and the main jobs coming from wind in my district are long shore jobs that's quite true importing blades and towers etc what can we do as we move towards a green economy cognizant of by america but also cognizant of protectionism issues and what else can we do to make sure that if we come up with newer technologies we don't end up importing that technology like we import so many other things  think wind for sure offers a unique opportunity for domestic manufacturing the physical product size the blades are huge they wait fifteen twenty thousand pounds apiece the towers are difficult and expensive to transport so the tradeoff is labor cost versus transportation cost net of incentives if there are any and the other truth says we don't like it mexico is cheap so in the end of the day and these products are fairly labor intensive as it turns out so i think what can we do we talked a bit a while ago about the noble electricity standard just some strong long term fundamental policies that causes boards of directors to make investments in the u s for long term periods of time that's one the other is just to help incentivize work create more competitive u s manufacturing technology angle to that plant we opened in newton iowa there were state and local incentives that didn't match one for one match maybe one fourth to one of the investments we made as our company but it was still an adequate  incentive to cause us to not build that plant mexico and instead build that plant so i think the window opportunity offers a unique opportunity because of the transportation cost the rest that's on the policy side the key point about that from the article in harvard business review and elsewhere that i've read a lot and spoken to people is we may think oh we're going to develop the technology here and we're going to just export the manufacturing but when you export the manufacturing you're exploiting the seed corn for your to their technology because you just have to interact on a daily basis with the manufacturing to get the feel for how it works and so this myth that we're just going to do all the smart stuff here and export manual labor outside eventually the smart stuff gone too and you've got nothing left is that a fair concern any other comments on that that colleagues would just say that we lost the market leadership in these technologies so they built the plants elsewhere where they build them they often incentivize them in germany they incentivize fifty percent of the capital cause they build them in michigan they incentivize in michigan the cost of transportation is voided cost in all these cases so we should take advantage of that and in the case of p v it's not a high labor costs so it's a technology that we can do here in the united states and be competitive but i do think that you're right this is a national issue so not an issue for just energy it's a renewal it's an issue for our country and it's much bigger than we are i hope that some for their hearings on that topic mr dr yeah i just want to comment on the university side of this you know as university programs depend on research which pointed out before that brings programs that bring students that brings technology innovation once you have a trained workforce companies are very very interested co locate where that trained workforce it so there's a huge education piece that we need to remember and that's directly related to the research piece at least at the university level excellent point mr inglis recognize accept many many sources of electricity and a distributed system is that right i mean it is a question about the ability of the grid to accept all that power that is a key issue after the cost issue that's the biggest challenge for all of us is how to get beyond a certain level of penetration without destabilizing the grid and so what you do there is a couple of things first of all there's a natural tendency to want to deal with more smarter grids that can handle faster decisionmaking so that's a smart grid aspect that actually goes back to the person who's dispatching and what the resources are that they're dispatching the second thing was mentioned earlier on when this now started happening in solar and that's solar forecasting so when you can forecast the intermittency then you don't have the spinning reserve spinning all the time waiting for that cloud to come over that cloud bank to come over you only turn him on a half an hour before it comes over because you know well enough when it's going to come over so there's a lot of work being done on solar forecasting very valuable so these things get us up towards those high levels of penetration that we were talking about whether it's twenty percent twenty five thirty fifteen percent of somewhere in that range that you can do without storage once you get to that point though you're going to start looking at storage and you're going to start looking at distribution storage and start looking at issues with transportation like using batteries for plug in hybrids and electric vehicles for some of that storage so that you move into that next level where you solve those grid look related problems and as i said earlier i think the good news is and i think this is rare that we can do almost as much solar and wind as we want for the their production to be consistent with your sporadic production and for a long while probably what fifteen twenty years will be ok there but it may take that long or longer to develop alternative storage technologies and we need to get going and my perception is that we are getting going i have the largest ones solar home size batteries that they sell these are lead acid batteries still nothing compete batteries for for storage per dollar you can't put it in a car because they're too heavy but storage for dollar nothing can lead acid you're going to start huge amount you're still not going to do it there because it's takes far far too many a lot of creative technologies out there like pumping air pressure into some big thing like having a water tower with a membrane on top and loading it up with steel which is seven times as heavy as water pumping that up so that gives you the effect of a very high water column i have noticed no broad area solicitation that's asking for creative solutions to this energy thing have i missed something you know i can come with respect to new york state new york state is installing a twenty megawatt fly delivering program as is the advanced program so we are definitely intrigued with trying to do some of that work also we have also done a lot of work wind integration we think we can take ten percent to fifteen percent integration in new york with wi starting a new program to actually dispatch wind where they're actually providing price signals when they're when the system part of nation occurs they are asked to back down and curtail make an economic decision so i think that we are getting far more sophisticated i think we we trust we can handle more wind on the system but i think we are intrigued by storage and we're just at the cost of moving forward with a lot more work in new york that's been york but do we have a national aggressive program and developing story technologies i think that's a wonderful idea i think really should be done especially with the knowledge that we have time to be creative and to do a really good job  of a cut and paste kind of job so i think i was be a great idea and i would also suggest there's probably going to happen with wind first before it happens with solar because it's going to be a long time before we're switching solar from the day to the night but it be a pretty short time before we start switching when from night to day dr marley maybe we ought to consider having a hearing on that very topic i'd be interested in working with that you know i think that storage is one of the big challenges here and the and quality of energy and fossil fuels is just incredible and when we are forced as we will eventually we will have a world in which we are not using fossil fuels geology will assure that when that time comes we're going to have some huge storage capabilities that we're not going to be live in the kind of lifestyle we live now and it may take quite a long time to develop and so we need to get started thank you doctor i just want to comment and support the need for a storage program i served on d o we wind review panel and there was a significant discussion and really just to make the point most people in the wind community feel that we got to the same consensus we don't need it right now we need to use wind research dollars to address when specific issues storage needs to address somewhere else so i would support the idea very strongly for an independent hearing and some some real focus on storage itself i would be happy to work with gentlemen as always  think a very important insight there any further comments or question dr brown before we close with that i want to thank the witnesses for a most informative and interesting hearing thank you for your time thanks for everyone else who attended  today the record will remain open for two weeks for additional statements from the members and for answers to any follow up questions a subcommittee may ask of the witnesses without the witnesses or excuse i thank my colleagues for their participation and the hearing is