SponsorRegisterPast Phase IIForward This

Mike Eckhart & Andy Karsner

Phase II of Renewable Energy in America

National Policy Conference

November 28-29

Cannon Caucus Room, Washington, DC

American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE)

Mike Eckhart:  The leader of the National Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency program, Alexander Andy Karsner, has been a friend of ACORE from the beginning and ACORE to him, as he's come in to the US Department of Energy from the private sector.  He didn't have to do it.  He volunteered for government service to come in and do something bold and change things for the better, to bring the private sector to the government program, and to connect the financial community to the commercialization efforts.  Andy has a long and distinguished career in the private sector in finance, in power project development in the United States, in Pakistan, in Morocco, around the world.  He's uniquely suited to be here with us this morning not only from his domestic responsibilities in the U.S. DOE as the Assistant Secretary for the ENRE but from his global perspective and experience.  Please welcome Andy Karsner.

Andy Karsner:  Thanks, Mike.  Thanks for your leadership and thanks for bringing together this stellar group.  The ACORE board is like a board to me.  They're really the all-star cast of energy and environmental minds in the country today.  So I'm pleased that you keep inviting me back.  My message doesn't really change that much because not a lot is moving in the halls of Congress where I am brow-beating.  And I am hopeful that you all will take the opportunity of meeting here on Capital Hill to not just take rhetorically and aspirationally about those things that you are dissatisfied with but that you will use the moment that the energy debate is currently going on in the chambers across the street and in these hallways to have your voice heard.  It was unfortunate for me that I couldn't be with you last year.  I did hear about and every much appreciated the tribute and the thoughts and prayers that you had put out at the time we had an illness in my family but I have to tell you I felt the energy.  Very far away from here I feel the energy of the folks in this room, and so it is all that much more delightful to be here in person with you but I'm hoping to amp up the energy.  Perhaps it's the ambiance lighting here but you've got, which I'm hoping is actually energy star qualified CFLs, but it may in fact not be which would be one more thing to put on the agenda across the chamber.  I think that I have to talk to you fast because I'm headed to Detroit to speak to the geniuses in Detroit if you will at the highest level for our annual Freedom Core and Fuel Partnership meeting, and that will be an interesting couple of days that we'll have together and I'll comment on that for you in the spirit of full disclosure.  But let me sort of tell you where the end is of what I want to say which is that this is about energy.  The national dialogue, everything we're talking about, everything we've been talking about for a long time that has moved you into Phase II is about energy.  It's about your energy, your personal energy, your clean energy technologies and really above all it's about time, and we're not getting that message through enough.  I have to thank John Geesman for that very warm windup on who would stand up for federal leadership.  That's what I'm here to do.  And John to answer your question more specifically, it's not about the political leaders that we would like to accuse of failure, whether in Congress or the Administration or in the states or elsewhere, the people who can stand up for federal leadership are people who worked for Dan Ricker.  David Rogers, Steve Chalk, the career civil servants that lead this mission and have for two and three decades at the national renewable laboratory in the Department of Energy that we're with me to midnight last night slaving away on a budget.  So I want you to bear that in mind because I think when we talk about setting a tone for the conference it's not only about what you want but about your creditability in achieving it.  There is a bipartisan coalition that supports the mission that you will be talking about today and there is a bipartisan coalition of people who are against the mission, and whether you like this President, whether you voted for a different man, it doesn't matter anymore.  We have shuffled the deck permanently of political cards in this town and we have taken the veneer off of one party being exclusively for supply and production and another being about conservation and efficiency and we have said we need all of it and we need the attributes to be clean and secure and domestic and enhancing, competition and security and climate, and you either get a national and geopolitical and global energy strategy or you are for something less in the 21st century.  So I would encourage you to use the advantage of a bipartisan board of ACORE.  A bipartisan message by ACORE and clearly a non-partisan urgency and emphasize and give extra effort and support and encouragement to all the leaders in this town, in the administration and in the halls of Congress, whichever party they belong to, whatever color state they come from, and ensure that your agenda goes over the top and doesn't get pigeonholed into a green ghetto where somebody can describe it as something less than the morale imperative of our time.  I hope that is your tone going forward.  There's so many reports that call for us to do this.  You have seen a spectrum, an array of problem identification reports culminating of course in the one lauded by the Nobel Peace Prize, the IPCC report, which was largely funded by this Administration and put with administration scientists as members.  And so we embrace that particular report as we do many of the other intelligent things that have come out of Robbie Diamond's group, the SAFE group and many of the elements from Reid Betchin [ph?] and so many-- Bill Holmberg and people who work on 25 by 25 and there's the Pew Center and the Hewlett Center.  But the problem with all these reports is we have problem identification in spades today.  We don't have sufficient problem-solving going on commensurate with the level and detail of problem ID that has been put forward.  I want to call your attention to one of the reports because these all represent a very broad spectrum of folks.  The one I find very, very interesting that I keep on my desktop is called The Hard Truce, the first of the new energy reality.  It's put out by the Domestic Petroleum Counsel that from time to time has put out a report by the state of the energy industry and those reports have typically looked very similar through time.  If we can access more, if we can drill more, we will solve the solution more.  This particular report is very, very different.  If you haven't read it I would encourage you to.  It no longer says we can drill our way out of a problem.  That's a significant thing coming from the National Petroleum Counsel.  There are other very significant things coming from this particular report when you can consider who wrote it.  That the risk of conventional energy production and its access and its availability have never been as great and the supply can not keep up with demand over the next 30 years.  That we have to maximize every molecule of energy including renewable and alternative sources.  That the focus has to be across the board in transportation and production on efficiency as a resource that we can quantify, prioritize, realize, and I would add that we should profit from, and that there needs to be policy regarding carbon predictability and accounting of the environment externalities.  Now this is all the more interesting because the report is chaired by none other than the former chairman of the Exxon Mobile Corporation, Lee Raymond; that great apostle of climate change.  So I would say we can close the book on how much more white paper needs to be written on problem identification.  Your Phase II efforts today and onward need to be about implementation of solutions.  Well-identified solutions, multiple-pass solutions, parallel paths, trying what we must because it's about energy, it's about your energy, it's about clean energy, and it's about time.  We have to make decisive action, and the first decision you have to make is self-awareness.  Everybody in this room knows why you are here and gathered.  Help everyone in the chambers understand why they're here and what they're talking about.  Help them make a determination about whether they are ultimately going to be agents of conventional energy incumbency or whether they can be agents of disruption and change on a magnitude and scale and at a pace that is consequential to the challenges that we face as a nation and as a planet.  We have to be agents of disruption.  We need disruptive organizational and institutional change and mechanisms in order to ultimately evolve disruptive technologies at a rate and in a timeframe that matters.  And so what I am telling you now is what I have told you before on multiple occasions, nothing has really changed perhaps except for the sense of urgency, except for the fevered pitch that which I speak and at which you meet to discuss and try and move these things because frankly the clock is ticking.  To my mind the administration has made enormous strides.  When a President talks about addiction to oil and repeatedly in his most prominent address talks about the nature and the growth necessary and renewable energy to erode our addiction to oil, those are enormously important watermarks.  And these are difficult times to compete in the new cycle with wars overseas, with the travails of Brittney Spears at home.  But this message is persistent and it is clear and the things that the President asked for, a mandate to decouple the price of oil from the price of alternative fuels and sources, electricity and clean biofuels, a mandate that is unprecedented in size and scope and timetable of the life that have never been tabled in this nation or any other nation on this earth, a mandate of the size and scope that is not yet been matched by any policy that Congress has put forward, that they're currently debating whether or not they can achieve it, is a significant watermark in shaping an industry and reshuffling the debt and saying we need new policy means to devise the ends that we seek and the outcomes we seek.  We not only want Congress to be able to arise to those numbers, we have no idea whether the house actually intends to put anything relative to transportation in their legislation, we are very, very hopeful but we can't wait.  And so we will exercise administrative authority and we will promulgate regulations whether or not they end up in litigation and of course they will.  Suing is a part of our process of promulgating new policy environments clearly.  It's not where I choose to dwell but I will tell you this, everything that sets a new watermark offers more certainty and predictability to direction of the capital markets, and that is why the administration will move forward to regulate even as we prefer legislation in a form and shape that the President can sign on a bipartisan basis, and that is why we have spent enormous hours on Capital Hill helping with technical drafting assistance on the bipartisan basis without regard to where you're from or what party you choose to dwell in.  Anybody who would add to the equation for better and more intelligent means of devising a plan standards, federal procurement, long term procurement, shaping this market, the appropriate mandates, this Department of Energy has been dispatched to be helpful, to be on side and in the more than dozens of occasions that I have testified on the same, that has been clear that we have been calling for these things consistency.  So I would say if you're not aware of federal leadership on this you're simply not attuned to-- or rather you're maybe attuned to the message you want to believe and not the new energy reality that has broken out in Washington.  Nobody actually knows where the cards have landed in this reshuffling.  We don't know.  We don't really know what's going to happen.  Your voices will be critical in shaping it and I would say the more you can get it to a non-partisan permanent part of our culture the better off the clean energy industry will be moving forward.  And it is something we absolutely need because it is not a temporary point in time.  This is a multi-generational task, and there is so much moving in the market place that we don't yet understand.  A year ago it was altogether possible with the debates going on that someone might push forward for a four on the price of oil under the very logical assumption that oil alternatives can compete and it didn't go beneath a certain price.  A year later, 50 percent higher in the price of oil from the time that we called for action by the driving season in the summer, a year later.  The price of oil is knocking on record highs, triple digits, for the first time and the price of alternative clean biofuels is going in the other direction.  There's a decoupling in the price point, something no one could have expected, an odd divergence, which probably shouldn't occur under all the assumptions if there were fair access to market by all the actors but something has gone terribly wrong in the marketplace and so we have to question all of our assumptions and say what is going on.  How did it come to pass that a year ago all the experts for decades who could explain from Argon National Laboratory, et cetera, the Weld a Wheels analysis and the carbon balance, from not always cellulosic ethanol that is our ultimate destination in terms of biofuel pathways and all the federal money dedicated to it more than $1 billion in the last year and by contrast the President's hydrogen fuel initiative was $1.2 billion, $1 billion committed in the last year, accelerating multiple pathways in different parts of the country, with the first feed stocks, with the first conversion technologies, accelerating our 2012 goal likely getting ahead of it, having global alliances, I see my friend from China in the audience that I was with him in Beijing last week, welcome, and our alliance with the Chinese government and the Brazilians moving forward on a global basis on all these fronts and not only that we know the conventional ethanol itself it is a necessary precursor, something that finds its own equilibrium in the market place and flattens out, something that is not ultimately sustainable and edible a feedstock mix we intentionally seek to surpass and go beyond but is a precursor because we have to have the terminaling facilities, the transport facilities, the retail policies, the studies on the engines, we have to understand this.  You don't turn on one biofuel overnight in favor of another.  All that moving very smoothly until the PR machine turned on and told us our strategic supply of Doritos was going away.  What shall we do?  How do we kill this industry?  How do we send the price point down to record lows even as oil hits record highs?  How do we leave billions of dollars on the table, that if it were absorbed would be lowering the price of gasoline today, would be lowering our carbon balance today?  Don't get sucked into the media machine and the public affairs machine and the government relations machines.  Be honest brokers, understand the science, understand the multi-generational plan, and know that the only dollars your federal government Department of Energy puts into the conventional ethanol economy are for sustainability to deal with nitrates and phosphates and things in the environment that effect our long-term view.  So all this silly notion that this is going on haphazardly for a few profiteers is somehow motivated by something less either than logic or truth, and I want to make clear that message today because I will be taking it to Detroit.  Let's see are there a few other things on my mind, I just got my glasses on.  I want to tell you too about the efforts on commercialization.  There is so much going on that is new, that is inspired by phase two and where things are in the marketplace.  For the first time we gathered a commercialization team in our front office and we intend to make it a permanent feature.  We put out a solicitation in fact for three new executive officers at the highest level of the federal government that would come in our office and bridge administrations and not be long term pensioners.  Not seek that federal career but would offer service for two or three years of their life on a rotating and staggered basis to inform guys like Dan and me about what's going on in project finance and what's going on in equity, but before that process of course we brought them in politically and we have a very tight team around us of very intelligent sharp young people.  That many of you are aware we opened up the Department of Energy in new kind of ways to create user friendly nexus so that you people can take regularized peeks behind the curtains and get it into the laboratories with venture technology showcases that would show the best of the federally-funded technologies and urge people to get them beyond.  And then we went beyond with a solicitation that's currently on the street, our entrepreneur- in-residence program, for the first time ever imbedding entrepreneurs to our national labs.  Letting them stay there and reside there and pick and choose the technologies that they can then take out and defuse into the marketplace, and more than that help them, pay for them, cover their overhead, and most importantly offer them boiler plate user friendly IP intellectual property technology transfer agreements that would enable rapid action, and so that we hope that these three are a success at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, Sandia, and Inria [ph?], and that then they would proliferate.  Not just within these labs but across these labs and increasingly breakdown walls of insularity that for too long have separated public sector research from private sector success.  You all must be aware to of the efforts that we have tried to inject into the energy bill process to aggregate federal procurement.  For a long time this has been the big dream.  How do we use the federal government and our energy procurement practices, which by the way are at a record high, more than tripled in the last two years in terms of the amount of energy efficient private financing that we have done for the federal government, the clean energy procurement that we have done for the federal government, but not nearly enough to hang our hat on when we talk about what the possibilities can be.  But we can't as long as we're completely balkanized across myriad agencies, as long as we rely on the goodwill of a single commander at a base who's shift ends after 36 months, we can not purchase intelligently until we can aggregate and have long-term contracting and that is why we are very excited about the provisions that deal 30 year private purchase power for renewable energy across the federal government coupled with the historic executive order that the President put out to silent media last January that set above the energy policy act requirements more than 30 percent higher efficiency standards for the federal government in terms of its procurement which forces us as a federal government to rely on private sector entrepreneurs, financiers, and business to account for us to be in compliance with our renewable energy objectives and for the first time mandates the use of plug-in hybrids as and when they become available at scale competitively.  We're doing all these things and as importantly on the side of equity and stimulus for the entrepreneurship, for the innovation of many of you and your companies, the loan guarantee program, Title 17 of the energy policy act.  The President has requested $13 billion to date, $13 billion.  Put that in perspective.  For all the things we do, nuclear weapons, stock pile stewardship, legacy management, and cleanup of Hanford, everything that the Department of Energy on an annual basis, $25 billion, and we've requested $13 billion for any technologies that avoid sequester and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and we got out that rule.  It's an arduousness process, and it's questionable whether DOE is even the right agency where this should be to handle this kind of risk management.  But it is clear that we have an obligation to use the federal balance sheet to bridge market imperfections, to account for life cycle cause and the intrinsic characteristics of conversion devices in a new energy economy.  And so we will plow forward with this loan guarantee program and hope for its maturity and evolution.  But you should be aware of it and you should be supportive of it and you should see it's expanded and well-managed for generations to come.  I was going to tell you specifically about some of the things that we intend to announce in the very near future about concentrated solar power specifically just because its one of my favorites.  I hate to say that we have any technology preferences.  We don't.  But in fact what I have is technology sympathies.  I don't like seeing a technology that is under-utilized or under performing its opportunity in the market place.  CSP has certainly fallen in that category over the years and so we have sought to resurrect it just as we are seeking to resurrect geothermal around what enhanced geothermal systems and the possibilities that Jeff Tester outlined in that excellent report and just as we seek to lay out a vision beyond incrementalism for wind energy, up to 20 percent of our national generating capacity.  And all these things together we say are gigawatt renewables.  Stop with the arguments that these technologies are marginal and always will be.  It is a limitation of the imagination but it's beneath the leadership of this country and that is why the President has come out and said that solar and wind can be so substantial, so proportionately high in our national energy balance.  And that means things for the agents of energy incumbency, and it should mean things for the agents of disruption, and that is why I'm encouraging you to not focus on who you can make a villain but focus on what the opportunity is to reach across the aisle where ever you find it and create a new coalition of people who give realization to our national aspirations and get way beyond the rhetoric of past with absolute quantification and metrics and time that can matter.  We haven't done enough of this.  We focused on the efficiency of a cell.  We have focused on the efficacy of a blade.  These are good things but with a market cap in excess of $100 billion in solar industry perhaps they're not the main things that the federal government ought to be doing with its indispensable role and authority.  And we intend to exercise our authority where we can at the highest level to convene appropriately with the Department of Interior, with BLM, with the MMS, with the Department of Defense, to ensure we have a new era of citing and permitting and inner connection and above all the things that you will hear form Pat Wood, transmission, transmission, transmission, so that we can understand what is necessary for a new era of clean energy super highways.  And not just that, the on-ramps and the smallest places that can enable net metering and intelligent smart metering and a better way to handle our grid for distributive generation so that on both ends of the scale, gigawatt scale portion of utility grade clean energy and the scaling of small home integrated devices, integrated in a way that we might have our vehicles generating into our homes to be realized.  But it can only be realized when we start talking rationally about the grid and I see you have great speakers to do that so I won't dwell here except for to say all the political candidate you may have read about in yesterday's New York Times comparing their thing and how they're for renewable energy and how they like solar and how they like wind, don't let them off the hook until they answer to you what they're doing about the nation's transmission.  There is no realization of these things without an intelligent discussion of transmission for both distributed generation and national backbones for a national plan for rational resources utilization, maximizing wind where it is in the Midwest, solar where it is in the Southwest, aggregating geothermal where we can, this is a planning exercise.  This is not technology development.  This is how intelligent we can be as a nation, and the good thing is we don't have to look very far, to Germany or Japan; we can look into our history.  We can go back 100 years and see that our grandfathers had the foresight to go into the middle of the desert and harness renewable resources that were emission-free at scale to make up a large proportion of our generation where nobody lived at all and build the infrastructure to deliver it to the load centers in Southern California and create opportunities in the Southwest, and that's why Graham Cooley and Hoover were built and serve us today.  Long, long past they would have-- what the debate would have been about their capital cost effectiveness against the eventual incumbents because they took 40 or 50 years to pay off.  And their still paying us off today with pennies on the dollar and it should be no different for this technology set whether it is wind blowing over our open spaces or sun beaming down on us from above, we have fusion energy, it's just millions of miles away.  So let's harness it.  Make it clear, make it simple, educate the policy makers, make it bipartisan.  Now I've got to-- I think I got to go really soon but and I apologize Mike, I've probably gone over a little bit, but there's two things I want to talk to you all about because I'm heading there, Detroit first of all.  It's our annual Freedom Core and Fuel Partnership meeting.  It's the highest level meeting we have.  It's a board Dan sat on, it's a board I sit on where we embrace the auto industry.  And over the years this partnership has had many good plans and has yielded many good technological results.  Started with the EV1 multi-year plan, and then we kind of change administrations and we got into the project for the next generation vehicle, another multi-year plan for high efficiency vehicles.  And then we changed administrations and we go in to the hydrogen fuel initiative.  It's all yielded very good technological results.  A number of them in VJ's book, talks about the available technologies and that's what I want to talk about with the automakers.  I figure the next, just over the horizon super plan, belongs to somebody else.  I think it's really time to go through the inventory and talk about how we onboard the available technology for efficiency in our engines and our light weighting materials and our flexible fuel capacity that we have called for repeatedly to be in every make and model, by every manufacturer that services the United States market, make it ubiquitous as an option available to every American at least, it's almost as cheap as the mud flaps.  Everyday we wait a car goes into our national fleet that takes 17 years to exit.  Everyday we wait we compound our problem for two decades on an increasingly expediential basis before we talk about production in China and India and elsewhere in the world.  That's what I'm going to talk about in Detroit.  How do we expand the scope of what we are working on with immediacy?  How do we expand the partnership to ensure that the battery guys are at the table and the biofuel guys at the table, and all the technologies are accounted for?  There's one other place I'm going, and you may have heard of this one, I'm sure you'll watch it with interest, it's called Bali, and I'm very proud that I'll be amongst the leaders in the delegation to go to Bali.  I was joking with my friend Roger Valentine it's a little bit like going to the Boston common public square asking for a lashing but there is many important things to achieve in Bali.  Number one amongst them is a post 2012 global framework that includes all developed and developing nations.  There can't be an accord without the United States of America and China that is net effective to this problem and any methodology to the contrary should exit from your rhetoric.  The President has made clear we don't have all the answers.  No one country does.  This mountain is a very big one to scale.  It will take differentiating solutions, respecting national circumstances and the development priorities of many nations, but the solutions have to be credible, they have to be attainable, and above all they have to be enforceable with existing jurisdictions that have the capacity to enforce them.  And something more.  We cannot have this discussion about carbon constraint and isolation of a discussion about technology diffusion that scales.  It is not a truism that curtailing our carbon problem is tantamount to solution enablement of scaling the solutions that displace the sources of the problem.  These two conversations must go hand in hand and that is why we have proposed a global clean energy fund, the global stakeholders that we meet on with what we call the major economies meeting process.  A process that began here in September endorsed by the Secretary General of the United Nations as feeding through the UNFCC process and Eva Tabor the chief negotiator of client for the United Nations and something that you all should endorse.  Something that I believe many of the people from the Clinton era would understand a concentrated focused conversation amongst the 17 countries that constitute in excess of 80 percent of the global emissions, and certainly constitute the highest proportion probability of contributing problem solving to the solutions.  Focusing on not less than monthly before we get to the next big party, before Copenhagen, before the end of the administration in a way that we can have an agenda that moves the needle and doesn't just seek the annual big media bang, the grand bargain that solves everything, but instead takes the wins along the way as we scale this mountain from whichever different angle.  Well that's just about it.  I've got 418 days left, 418 days.  And some of those reports I mentioned most all of them agree Hewlett, Pew, IBCC, we've really got about 10 to 15 years to solve this problem.  That doesn't mean 10 or 15 more policy conferences.  That means action now.  418 days out of 10 years whether you like this administration, whether you don't like this administration, you need to find the people you can agree with and work with in these halls of Congress and these federal buildings and take advantage of the next 12 percent of the next 10 years.  If a journey of a 1000 miles begins with the first steps we are certainly in need of the first steps now.  I hope your tone is bipartisan, less accusatory, more productive, encouraging, educating, and the people in the chambers across the hallway that need it most and with your friends in the administration that can use your encouragement and your support most of whom are dedicated civil servants that have been slaving at this for three decades.  Last place I want to talk to you about is a place I was at last week, Hoover Institution.  George Schultz has put together a panel.  George Schultz, 87-years young, spry, intact, intelligent.  Some of you if you weren't around in the George Schultz era and know what he did for points of inflection in time, to change the history of our world, will recall that he wrote the intro to Armory Lovins' book Winning the Oil Endgame.  He is a passionate believer in these technologies and I am a passionate fan of George Schultz and the work he is now doing getting together Nobel Prize winners, the former head of the Counsel of Economic Advisors, Michael Boskin from the Bush 41 administration, former members of this administration at the Hoover Institution, with the simple question what is the best, most intelligent policies for our times with the least overbearing footprint that yields the greatest return amongst you all to catalyze the private sector to deal with the externalities and flow.  There are two things I want to share with you that Secretary Schultz shared with me.  The first is never believe the lame duck self-fulfilling prophecy.  That only exists in the minds of those who are seeking a political construct and the media who definitely wants to be more attuned to the ratings of a political campaign than what is going on in the status quo.  Those who are in government and those who work with government have the greatest opportunity while this political construct is devised.  And he made the point that during the period of least popularity for President Reagan and most controversy in Iran Contra were his most productive years because the table had been set and the work could be done by those who remained focused while everybody else was focused on the new.  I take great heart in that.  The second thing that Secretary Schultz left me with was a personal antidote that we exchanged.  I'd come from the Gleneagles negotiations in Berlin and I shared with him what a thrill it was to be back in Berlin for the first time since November of 1989 and I told him about the piece of the Berlin wall that I keep in my office and what a meaningful reflection point in history that was for my life.  To look out from the Hotel Adlon at something that had no barbed wire, no shoot-to-kill orders, an American embassy being built, a thriving plaza, young tourists, and to tell him how important I thought his role in that.  So he shared with me a conversation he had with President Reagan before and after he gave his famous speech about tearing down the wall.  And he said there was great controversy.  It's all true.  We kept trying to take it out of the speech because it wasn't diplomatic and the President kept insisting and ultimately wrote himself in, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."  But after the speech what people don't know is that the President said "I'm not sure I got it exactly right.  I know that what I wanted to say was tear down the wall now, it's urgent, it's important.  But the real message I wanted to deliver and I'm not sure it fully came through was that this wall is not permanent.  These barriers can't stand the test of time.  They will erode.  Change will occur and it'll occur when we least expect it."  And I think Secretary Schultz shared that message with me for a specific reason.  The lesson is true today.  Don't believe the pubic affairs and government relations machines or the other hype.  Keep the course, stay consistent, be bipartisan, get your message across.  These walls will fall.  A new era of clean energy technology born out of your Phase II leadership will occur and I thank you for having me to talk about it with you today and I thank you from my bottom of my heart for the work that you do.
<applause>