society for many years has been trying to deal with the problems of transportation in energy well right here today we have the solutions with steve marshall from the center for advanced transportation and energy energy solutions steve welcome thank you very much  thank you from a citizen standpoint for coming to the conclusions that you're coming to with we're going to transportation energy it's always nice for to bring solutions good good happy to do it so tell us about the i think you the acronym is kate's it is we created this a few years ago john ailes and myself to look at the emerging disruptive technologies that were coming together interest for taishan and with an energy complement moving from more oil to electricity moving to faster greener safer vehicles that are connected increasingly of thomas and the idea was to try to figure out well how could you bring these things together in a way under a public policy roadmap that help to integrate them into excel or rate them so that's why we formed it and we're working hard to make that happen so essentially you guys are a think tank we are worth but they can as john says do tank so we're trying not only that they can put up papers and hold conferences and do studies but also to work with legislators and with others to develop the kind of legislation the kind of approaches that you need to make this happen are they listening well they are they are it's good but like so many things the technologies are coming so fast and they have the power to disrupt that a lot of folks at the be brought on board with the actual demonstration so one of the things we're trying to focus on is how do you do large scale demonstration projects to show that what we're talking about can actually happen and be safe be greener be faster and more convenient if the public is watching how do they know that you know what you're talking about well i don't know if they do i think it's the proof will be and what we can put out but my background is in utilities john's is in transportation i started out technology of electric vehicles which i thought at first was going to be a problem a headache and trying to figure out how do you power these vehicles and how do you get utilities to to do enough planning so that they could beat those challenges well we found out what i found out is that actually it's a great opportunity by moving for a while to electricity you can make the grid more efficient you could reduce greenhouse gas emissions and in this state you could make the powering of vehicles but cheaper i'm going to be really excited to talk about the electric vehicles in the green highway and all of the things that you talk about but i've got to ask you this how do you battle and run well i badly in enron it was it was a lot of work to try to get us out of the bankruptcy court that enron eventually fell into where creditors and people who were debtors have a hard time it was in new york so we worked with senator cantwell and others to do what became known as a cat well a bed but that put us before the federal energy regulatory commission and there we had a real chance to show that what enron had was not legal or appropriate under federal energy law and it worked we got out from underneath that rock now let's let's get into indicates and some of the solutions that you are advocating talk about an electric highway in a green highway but it all relates to one thing and saying that is reducing dependence upon oil not foreign oil but just oil is that right that's correct and it's interesting because in our economy one of the last things to be moving from traditional types of fuel to electricity is transportation almost everything is run by electricity except for vehicles ninety seven percent of all transportation is oil based gasoline diesel and so forth natural gas to some small degree so if you're looking to make a big dent in our oil use which we need to do moving from oil to electricity and transportation is the one area where you can do it and in our state because we've got such a clean oil well there is and i think most countries have realized that one of the chief things that you have to do to address greenhouse gas emissions which is a worldwide effort now is to reduce transportation in our state  most of the transportation greenhouse gases are the biggest part of greenhouse gas emissions yet everything up together it doesn't equal what you produce with transportation interstate worldwide it's less and we're ahead of the curve because our again our grid is so much cleaner carbon free brother world there are really only two maybe three words that you have to know about in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions is coal it's or oil and it's  natural yes so if you're going to reduce fossil fuel use you've got to address what are you going to do with coal what are going to do with replacing oil and then eventually replacing natural gas which is seen right now as kind of a bridge to reduce coal use and reduce some oil use but eventually if you want to get to that kind of a neutral position you got to deal with that as well so the discussion over clean coal versus on clean coal i guess is almost mo well it's difficult as it turned out to do the capturing and sequester ration of greenhouse gas emissions from coal at turned out to be a much tougher task a laboratory could show that you could do it but large scale sequester ration is very hard to do a very expensive to do so it doesn't look like that's going to work very well so either you conduct conferences or certainly participate in lead conferences with regard to the future of oil but it's really the future of transportation and energy as it is yes definitely and and again we're not just focused on greenhouse gas emissions and the environment we're looking at how do you do smarter faster safer transportation as well as having it be greener if you don't put all this together if you don't make it less expensive you're really not going to get tor you want to go while that that comes up to the next question and that is any time that there is a discussion of environmental sustainability now that  word has changed from environment to economic so is it we're doctrine on oil in transportation economically sustainable it really is and that's one of the things that hasn't gotten much publicity and this state for example we spend sixteen billion dollars a year on imported oil we don't produce any of our own oil so it's more than what we spend on k through twelve education it's a huge about we spend about ten or eleven billion on k through  we send that money out of the state by contrast we have our own production of hydro power here within the state's boundaries so you can save a lot of money and the comparison between what it cost for an equivalent gallon of gas at three eighty four in our state is about eighty four cents a gallon for electricity if you do the equivalency right away you can see right away you can see that you can save money yeah i mean three dollars a gallon that's a lot right but how d that work how how can you help me understand that someone who doesn't understand math well that you can translate all energy into barrel oil equivalent per kilowatt hour equivalent or british thermal you know the equivalent so what you convert all this production of electricity or production of fuel for operating cars you do the standard comparisons based on converting everything to a single standard and the looking at that fact that the biggest problem with energy conservation as we measure it right now in kilowatt hour save we don't look at it in terms of what can you save if you could save or oil so if you replace electricity basically use that to figure out how do you get away from kilowatt hours you're not really reducing much in greenhouse gas emissions because we're so low on those anyway would reduce the power but you save a lot if you move to electricity from oil right here in public exposure we're talking with steve marshall who is the executive director of the center for advanced transportation and energy solutions and yes they indeed are solutions and they are in a mix we strongly encourage you to go to the website and learn a lot more it's up on the screen and we will be showing that several times throughout the show we talked about problem one or the pendants and but there's a second problem that you talk and that's collisions but that doesn't mean that you do with oil or does it it really doesn't although right now what we're trying to figure out is how do you have cars without oil without accidents and without congestion and what's happened is the convergence of the technologies that have helped produce the move from oil to electricity in just the kinds of vehicles that are being produced also enable the vehicles to be connected not only to other infrastructure other vehicles but to utilities for advanced charging it often times so the whole network which is becoming known as the mobility internet where you're looking at the confluence of technologies not only on the oil side but on the smart connected car side are giving us the opportunity to really transform transportation all the way around so you can have cars that are greener safer faster more affordable than the current cars that we have right now and buy cars i mean every type of vehicle from small cars to pick up trucks and delivery trucks maybe not the eighteen wheelers but almost everything i'm hearing technology and when what you talk about but there's the other part is the people who produce the cars the people who who drill for oil and then sell it on the corner at the corner gas station  they're not ready to accept what white here are saying there are they but actually it turns out that the auto companies have a brace this much faster than i think people thought g m came up with the chevy volt long before there was if you look at the those latest movies involving mission impossible and so forth you're looking at the the b m w high end vehicles that have outperform anything around so it's a performance as well as a diversity issue away from fuels that they could become if not hard to find in the future at least a lot more expensive i think at first companies were a little bit reluctant to get into this but once they saw tesla making these vehicles once they saw some others doing it now we have competition that is wide open two years ago basically only two cars the volt and the nissan leaf now there's a couple of dozen available for people to choose from but we've seen technology move us as a society so fast in just the past several years alone i mean we don't need to talk about twenty years we just on what the last five years i think you were talking before the show about  writing an article and i think two thousand and eight and that was at a time when smartphones didn't exist well that's right and it's it's instructive to look at smartphones that came in about six years ago and think about the processing power of the connection to the internet the cloud all the information all the apps that we can get there making all of this a lot more possible a lot faster than i think people thought including a ton utilization of public transit i have to tell you i don't use public transit in this city because it doesn't go where i wanted to go and the buses are slow and dirty the trains again and they just don't you know i mean even to go to the airport it's too far for me to walk i'm going to take a cab and i'll just you know then they'll let me out of the airport so i it i can use it anymore well it's definitely a problem the underutilization in public transit means that we have more congested highways so one of the key questions is how do you get people to have other options that are really good from door to door that will get the word they want to go at the times you want to go in downtown seattle you have a hub and spoke system which works pretty well for people who live in that corridor north and south of the city but on the east side and farther north and farther south it's more like pick up sticks people are going every which direction a lot of our major employers live outside the city limits boeing and microsoft and r e i and cosco and so forth you can name a whole bunch of iconic companies so how do you get people to those places part of the solution or are ban pools were king county metro is working on getting more of those they're becoming more opportunities for electric nissan leaf fan pools and motor type fan bills really which is which is pretty neat but the idea is how do you create these more high tech intelligent transportation hubs where you can do social networking and scheduling software to enable people to do flexible via pools where they can find a number of people fast is kind of like car to go all working with the transit systems but the peak trying to solve the peak trying to get people where they need to go fast and greener is a key so i  agree it's tough because cars will get people where they want to go when they want to go and get them fairly quickly but if everybody just drove cars we would have a congested mass so how do you get just about everybody does but just about anybody does drive cars that i mean realistically well commute times into downtown seattle there's a healthy percentage that commute by by public transit and even on the east side there's about seventeen percent that go into bellevue by public transportation but you're right i think overall even the public entities that are looking at this the regional council believes by twenty forty there might be only about six to ten percent of the total transportation trips taken by public transit so what do you do about the other ninety percent is is the key yeah and is this with more and more people working out of their homes more and more companies saying it's ok for you to have your own technology and stay you know if your home is congestion just something to talk about and it's not truly a future problem i think it'll be a future problem but you continue to find people wanted to get together even at microsoft which of course you would think could do a lot of telecommuting they encourage people to come to meet other people to exchange ideas same thing you probably heard about a number of other companies yahoo and some others that don't want telecommuting telecommuting has a role but will it be a significant role or will you still need face to face communication to to really advance the kind of thinking that high tech companies and the creative folks need to have i don't really  have a good idea on how much telecommuting will happen in the future i kind of like being able to to be in a distant city and still be connected by voice mail of by internet but at the end of the day you're going to find that we're still going to need to have cities with large capacity to move a lot of people every day let's talk about the future now because this is also something that you talk about an awful lot at the center for advanced transportation and energy solutions by the way marshall who is the executive director of that organization is whether this be sure to go to the website that's up on the screen reinventing the automobile is the one of the very first things that you talk about and we've talked a little bit about it here but you kind of snuck in something on me and that was the driving right the that would be great i don't like to drive anyway is an amazing thing if you look at the google site and there's a fellow but it was steve ma gets into google driving a car it turns out after he's got a taco and he's not touching the steering wheel and he gets dry cleaning but he's blind and he says this is some of the best driving i've ever done well the people that google think that  driving cars will be on the market in five years people working with say is for like ten but ten years is a very long and to put it in perspective eastlake over to bellevue light rail will be done in twenty twenty three ten years so within ten years we're going to be having cars at least they will have a lot of the capacity to be self driving now between now and then you're going to have vehicles that will collide rear end with other ones that won't chip planes and four and cadillacs and so forth they all have cars that can under a certain speed limit drive you safely following other vehicles on the interstates and eventually probably in that ten year time frame you'll be able to get on a car go to san francisco san diego and shoot down in a group of other vehicles at eighty ninety miles an hour without having to worry about hitting other vehicles so well that happened well the process again the processing power of the smartphone applications the creation of the into related technologies is happening so fast that i think that will have i mean i know you're not an engineer and i don't want to put you on the spot but this is so cool i got ask how do those things work well they they work in a different ways i mean there are a combination of technologies there's radar technologies to prevent the rear end and there's what they call lighter using laser there's a combination with google maps where you have s systems overlaid with google maps where they've done everything there are cameras that are really cheap that look at stop signs and stop lights and pedestrians so you put all those together with the kind of computing power that you now have the processing power of real time you can get vehicles that are there pretty safe and eventually they might be as smart as a horse used to be well so i can actually get in my in my car i'm expecting to be able to get in my car and say you you know we would have thought a lot of things were real here five six years ago with smartphones if you know that yeah it's other things so is this out of range it might take a little bit longer than people think but eventually it'll be here now the shock to the system is something that i get concerned about i'm not talking about the technological system i'm talking about the social system you know an interesting thing if we were to look back on the life of a ninety year old today who would go back to his or her youth the world was so incredibly difficult and they're not doing real well and dealing with all the changes right and when we're ninety are we going to be able to deal with the changes that are happening w dad's eighty nine and he's looking forward to being able to drive a car that will drive him his father my grandfather used to be able to get on a horse after a grange dance type as rest of the saddle and have the horse take so get up early the next morning so will this be disruptive i think it will be i think it will be safer we're still killing about thirty thousand people a year on our roads this will do a lot to reduce that it'll be greener because you can make the cars lighter they don't have to be quite as beefy to avoid collisions and that has a lot of other benefits so will this be more or less disruptive what other changes  happen it will it'll probably be one of those things like the computer it will displace a lot of other technologies but people will say gosh i wish they invented that earlier and now this is likely to going to have some congressional intervention if not participation where were they on these types of technologies and their true implementation well congress was pretty good early on about helping with incentives for electric vehicles re way nine years early under the bush administration a lot of this was passed early on most people don't realize that and then that course it got accelerated by the department of energy trying to figure out what the eevee project what will people be by way of charging stations so congress has helped out a lot now with a ton of us vehicles with trying to figure out how to do self driving cars the people are now trying to figure out well how do we how do we roll that into the overall system and that's going to take a combination of the national highway traffic safety administration the e p a the u s department of transportation and even hud and they're working together ironically or are interest enough in trying to figure out well how how could we create a large scale demonstration project one of the things we're trying to do out here in the northwest is work with e p a the department of defense with joint base lewis mcchord with other areas to figure out can we figure out what sort of communication systems what sort of large scale networking that needs to be done make the standards more uniform test out some of the different approaches here on a large scale basis so you take joint baseless mcchord which has a big problem with transportation through that i five corridor and it would be nice to get more of the troops and contractors out of their vehicles and into some of the vehicles that are electric and then eventually self driving not only there but on the base to move people around which the department offense is interested in doing for other reasons then how do you hook that up to the utilities to call the power supplies the power there to make it so that you have good backup power you have the cars that can provide critical mission circuit backup power so one of the things we're trying to figure out is how kid we do a large scale public policy roadmap to test out some of these things so people have confidence that this will actually work because i think part of it's just going to be are people going to be nervous about getting to the vehicle that can theoretically drive itself will they figure it's safe enough and reliable enough and you only get there if you can show that it's been tested out by some institutions that are trustworthy enough to to be able to rear ended that vehicle so it was his fault and other companies are making them and they're being tested out by the department of defense as well so we're having i don't know how many here are in progress worldwide right now but it's of a wide range of folks looking at how can they get in and make the vehicles as safe as could be made if you just had a computer driving the car instead of a fallible human being and again these  with other vehicles putting you on a track that is better than a fixed rail track we have less than a minute to go on the show it's about thirty seconds and it seems that i'm hearing a lot of optimism from you as someone who is has been an energy consumption in transportation for quite some time that we actually can truly change can we i think we can we started putting on the conferences in two thousand and six when there was just one prototype one  prius that was converted into a plug in and now you have literally dozens of electric vehicles same thing is true of the top of this vehicle so it really is coming faster than people think it came faster than i thought it would steve thank you very much for being with us and steve marshall from the center for advanced transportation and energy solutions just amazing stuff be sure to go to the web site you're going to learn an awful lot more we'll see you right here next week on public exposure