A Road Less Taken: Energy Choices for the Future - Fairewinds' Johnson State College Presentation

This week Fairewinds' compares the paradigm of 20th century large nuclear power plants to the new 21st century paradigm utilizing smaller interconnected renewable sources of power in what is called distributed generation.  Significant advances in digital equipment and computers, like cell phones and cloud computing, are creating a new energy future using diverse sources of power that are less expensive and have a smaller environmental footprint.  View "A Road Less Taken: Energy Choices for the Future", Arnie's presentation last week at Vermont's Johnson State College.

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NWJ: Welcome to the Fairewinds Energy Education Podcast. Today’s podcast features Arnie Gundersen’s presentation A Road Less Taken: Energy Choices for our Future. This presentation was given at Johnson State University in Johnson, Vermont, to a group of students, some of whom are considering careers in the sciences.

AG: ...for coming. I’m Arnie Gundersen, and for those who are taking notes, there’s an “e” in Gundersen and there’s an “e” in Fairewinds. A couple of things before I start here. A lot of the Fairewinds crew is here with us. Nat, the videographer is here and Samantha over in the corner. We’re giving away some free book marks if you sign up for our list. And in the back of the room is my wife, Maggie. She’s the creative force that our web presence and the strategy for Fairewinds is hers. And of course, Les is on our board. So there’s – you have 5 of 10 probably people that are actively involved, in the room right now. Okay. Les asked me to speak a little bit about my background. But the speech today is about the transition that America is facing and the world is facing in the 21st Century. And I really think Robert Frost’s poem really touches on that really well. “I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere in ages and ages hence. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.” Well, we’re at a junction like that right now. This is the United States right now. We’re right there at that Y in the road. And we have an energy choice to make. And this presentation is a little bit about what your future will be that’s different than what my future was. Okay, a little bit about my background, as Les said.

I grew up in a town of like 20,000 people, like Winooski, Burlington size. My father was a carpenter; my mother was a home keeper and then when I was in high school, became an assistant for a doctor. So I was the first one on both sides of my family to go to college. When I went to college – this was before calculators – we used slide rules. And it was interesting. It was also before cell phones. We had to go down and use the phone in the dormitory. And one of the most important guys in the dorm was an electrical engineer who developed a dialer for the phone so we could constantly call the girls’ dorm. So as soon as somebody hung up on the other side, our phone would get in. So this was back when technology was in its infancy. I did my masters thesis on something called “cooling tower plume visibility” and the computer I used was about as big as this room, but two stories high. It was an IBM 360. It cost 2 million dollars, and now in my Macbook Pro I have more computing power than that computer ever had. So things have certainly changed. So I wound up with a masters degree in nuclear and I was licensed on a research reactor that used bomb-grade uranium. We had enough uranium there to build five nuclear bombs in our reactor. And you’re required to have a degree to run that. Interesting career path here for those who are interested is Vermont Yankee and other reactors don’t require a college degree to become a nuclear operator. You can become a nuclear operator at Vermont Yankee on a high school degree. The research reactor, because it was bomb grade material and in any event, we needed to have a masters degree. Then I became a senior vice president in the nuclear industry and I had groups that worked for me around 70 different nuclear plants.

(4:36) To make a long story really short, I became a nuclear whistle blower in 1990. There’s a lot of stuff on the web about that. And I had to recreate my life and Maggie and I were pretty much driven to our knees. We were driven into foreclosure and bankruptcy. And then you come out of it and life moves on. And we started the Fairewinds. And initially, it was really a geek site for expert reports. And then came Fukushima Daiichi. And I was on the – CNN asked me to be their expert. And the fifth day of the accident, I was saying to people, this is as bad as Chernobyl and possibly worse. At the same time, the United States government was telling everybody it’s nowhere near Three-Mile Island, which was a much lesser accident. And the Japanese weren’t even admitting it was that bad. So Fairewinds, our site, took off. We put videos on the site and we went from 80 visitors a day to 10,000 a day – literally in a two-day time span. It was a crazy ride. Last year, I spoke with Sharon Obade (??5:58) a Nobel prize winner and Helen Caldecott, who was nominated for a Nobel prize and whose organization actually got a Nobel prize and who calls me three times a week. And just last week, I was – I gave a presentation with Nehru Kahn, who is the former prime minister of Japan. And he was the prime minister during the accident, Ralph Nader, and a group of other people. So who would have thought that a carpenter’s kid from New Jersey could be on the stage with Nobel prize winners and Ralph Nader. So that’s been the arc of a career with a lot of bumps in between. All right. Now let’s talk about what we’re really here to talk about. You probably heard this term, nuclear renaissance, and going into the 21st Century, the momentum was that we would be building lots of nuclear power plants to avoid global warming. And the accident at Fukushima Daiichi changed all that. Power plants are becoming increasingly costly, but on top of that, though, public perception that a plant couldn’t blow up like a bomb, that nuclear power was inherently safe, was shattered with the accident at Daiichi. So literally overnight, especially ion Japan and Germany – and we’ll get to that a little later – the public’s perception of, do we really need to rely on nuclear moving forward, is a dramatic change and a fallout from Fukushima Daiichi. The experts claim the chance was one in a million of an accident. Do your math here. Put a million in the numerator and there’s 400 nuclear plants in the denominator. And that works out to be a nuclear accident about every 2,000, 2,500 years. So if we built all these nuclear plants when the Parthenon was built, we would have had one nuclear accident by the experts’ numbers. But historically, we’ve had 5 meltdowns in 35 years. Do the math. 35 divided by 5 is an accident every 7 years. So that real world data is showing that the experts are wrong by orders of magnitude. The other piece of it, though, is the expense of nuclear power. It’s incredibly expensive because it’s incredibly dangerous. And so you look at these big robust plants and there’s a hubris that sets in. And you say wow, look at how strong that is. Well, the reason they’re that strong is because the forces inside them are enormous. And if we don’t look at the forces inside, we can be lulled into a complacency about how rigid and how robust these plants really are. But in fact, a plant the size of Vermont Yankee is holding inside a room the size of a bedroom, 3 million horsepower of energy in one bedroom. So when a plant blows up like Daiichi, it’s because the horses got out of sync and tripped over each other and broke through the wall that was designed to contain them. (9:13) It’s a business that has to be contained 24/7, 365. And if it’s 24/7, 364, you wind up with Fukushima Daiichi the next day. Well, the old technology, the 20th Century way of making power was a central station power plant. This is a coal plant. This is a nuclear plant. They’re very robust and they’re huge, and they’re usually located remotely from population centers. This had to be done in the 20th Century. There was a lot of changes that occurred in 1990 to 2010 that have fundamental changed this paradigm. But the paradigm that I grew up with and that you started your life with was power had to be generated in a large central station power plant, and that it was remote and there was large transmission lines that led into the site. A quick briefing here on nuclear, we look at Vermont Yankee and they say clean, safe, reliable. I think they said that about Fukushima Daiichi one day before the accident, too. But the part of the nuclear fuel cycle that has the least environmental effect is the power plant itself. The front end of the cycle, though, has an enormous amount of environmental contamination. And the back end of a nuclear cycle, when you get rid of the waste, is where of course we’ll leave a legacy for generations to come. It’s called the nuclear fuel cycle. And nuclear fuel proponents like to think of it as a circle where you put fuel in, you burn it up in a nuclear reactor and then you recycle it and run it through the nuclear reactor again. They propose it as a closed loop tire, sort of. In fact, it’s a flat tire. This is the fuel cycle as people in the nuclear industry would like you to believe. And it starts with mining. And the mining then removes uranium from the fuel. And then it gets enriched. And I’ll talk about these in the next two slides. So the ore has very little uranium in it. And there’s a process of enriching it that then runs through a nuclear power plant and gets stored in a fuel pool. And right now, that’s where it stops. There’s no end to the cycle. We’re not reprocessing and we’re not storing the waste. We’re sticking it in a fuel pool 100 feet above ground at Vermont Yankee and at other plants. There’s enough – the fuel that’s in the pool at Vermont Yankee, there’s 35 years worth of nuclear fuel in the pool at the very top of the building. There’s more Cesium in that fuel pool – radioactive Cesium 137 – than in all of the bombs that were ever exploded in the atmosphere. 700 bombs were exploded in the atmosphere between 1945 and 1980 when bomb testing stopped. All of those bombs released Cesium in the atmosphere. There’s more Cesium at Vermont Yankee’s pool than in all those bombs. Okay. I want to talk a little bit about the mining side of uranium. A ton of rock that comes out of the ground that has uranium in it has about a kilogram of uranium in it. So I’ll avoid kilograms here and we’ll go to pounds. So a ton of rock has about 2 pounds of uranium in it. But that uranium can’t be used in a nuclear reactor because most of it is the stuff you can’t use – uranium 238. Less than 1 percent of the uranium in that 2 pounds is in fact usable in a nuclear reactor. So you have to enrich it. And what happens when you enrich it, that ton gets you 10 grams. A gram is a dollar bill. So a ton of dirt gets you the equivalent weight of 10 dollar bills of uranium that’s usable in a nuclear reactor. So when you see an open pit mine like that, you have to realize that all of that dirt is coming out of the ground, and for every ton of dirt that comes out, you’re getting the weight of 10 dollar bills in usable uranium. So it’s an incredibly labor intensive and environmentally destructive process.

(14:12) One of the things that happens is that the liquid – you can see the liquid here at the bottom here – and also over here, that’s called – that is very acidic water. And it turns out there’s a lot of studies out now that show that nuclear power plants kill more birds than windmills. And the reason is it’s not at the nuclear power plant. If it’s a windmill, you see the dead bird right at the base of the windmill. At a nuclear power plant the birds die in this acidic water. So the migratory birds coming down fly over these leaching ponds, land in them thinking it’s a lake and then die. So when you compare these technologies, windmills are in fact much more benign as far as even killing birds than is nuclear power. You can get a feel here for the amount of environmental damage to get enough uranium to run Vermont Yankee for 12 months. Okay. Now the next thing that happens is that ore then has to be enriched. Remember, I said that the ore is uranium, but 99 percent of that is uranium 238. So you need to get 235 to run a nuclear reactor. And that goes through something called enrichment. It’s converted to a gas, uranium hexafluoride, and spun – the slide after this is about the spinning of uranium. But what comes out is enriched uranium that goes into a reactor like Vermont Yankee. And then depleted uranium – anybody ever heard that word? Depleted uranium. Yeah. Couple of hands up here. Depleted uranium is, as far as a nuclear cycle goes, it’s a waste. But the military uses depleted uranium in warheads because of something called pyrophoric. It burns with a fire that water does not put out. So the M1 tank’s bullet that shoots out the barrel, the shell fires something called a fleshette, which is a high velocity round. There’s no explosive in that. It’s all depleted uranium. But when it hits steel, another tank, the friction causes it to explode spontaneously with a fire that cannot be put out. Interesting here for Vermont, the Gatling gun in the A10 warthog, which the National Guard used for years, was actually tested over here at the National Guard testing range and they used depleted uranium rounds when they were testing that gun. Okay. So let’s move on throughout the cycle here. That part of the process is heavily subsidized. I was out in Utah three weeks ago and there was a uranium mine, and all of these mill tailings, the waste from the uranium mine, were laid along the side of the Colorado River. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission insisted that the owner of that facility put aside 6 million dollars to clean it up. Well, it’s a billion dollar cleanup. And the owner declared bankruptcy and that billion dollars is ours to pay, which is effectively a taxpayer subsidy into the cleanup, into the nuclear fuel cycle. If you look at all of these subsidies over all of the years, nuclear is not cheap. Union of Concerned Scientists did a study that shows that nuclear power is about – subsidized to the tune of about 5 cents a kilowatt. Now what does that mean? Vermont Yankee was going to sell power to Vermont at 6 cents a kilowatt. And in fact, that was too pricey for the market. But in fact, if we strip the subsidies out, the power coming out of Vermont Yankee should have been 10 or 11 cents a kilowatt, which would have made it much too costly for anyone to ever consider as a fuel source. So the reason we have nuclear power right now is because it was a heavily subsidized fuel source for 70 years. And moving forward, the subsidies on new nukes are also – we’re building a new generation of nuclear power plants – those subsidies are also on the tune of about 5 cents a kilowatt. So if you strip the subsidies off the table, you’ll hear people say well, wind power is subsidized. Well, nuclear is the most heavily subsidized of any power source out there. And if you strip it off, we never would have gone down this nuclear road, the path we started in the 60’s when I was in college. Okay. I promised I’d show you what enrichment cells look like. And these are centrifuges. You put in uranium and you think of uranium as a heavy metal. But in fact, it’s converted to a gas and it’s spun at incredibly high speeds – 50,000 revolutions per minute. And because U238 is a little bit heavier than U235, the 38 moves out and the 35 stays behind, and you wind up enriching in 235. Well, this process, not only does it create uranium for nuclear power plants, it creates uranium for bombs. And proliferation risks with nuclear are something we all should worry about as the world gets more and more uranium power plants throughout the world in countries that are a little less stable than the United States. This is a map of countries that have uranium and have made bombs. That’s the pinkish red. United States, Russia, China, France, England and Israel. And also North Korea. And then countries that have foresworn nuclear power, countries like Canada, Australia, Japan, Norway – not foresworn nuclear power, but have foresworn the enrichment of nuclear power. So the Swedes, for instance, buy their uranium from someone else. They’re committed not to enriching uranium because they don’t want to be part of the risk of nuclear proliferation. Okay. We all learned from Daiichi that nuclear plants can explode. I thought about putting the famous picture of the plant exploding, but I’m sure you’ve seen that. We had hydrogen explosions at three of the nuclear reactors that destroyed their containments. Containments are meant to contain. They’re the last barrier of defense, and the containment not once, twice, but three times at Fukushima. This not a one-in-a-million chance. This is a one-in-a-million-million-million chance – 18 zeros after, the chance of that happening if you believe the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s numbers. But our process – this history shows that we had three meltdowns in three days with three explosions and containment failures. The other piece of it is the cost. This is another one of those subsidies that doesn’t enter into the balance sheet. To clean up after Fukushima Daiichi, it’s going to cost a half a trillion dollars. Now the power that Japan’s – the cost in power that Japan saved by building nuclear power plants is less than that. So the claim that we need to build nuclear power because it’s cheap, one accident at Fukushima Daiichi wiped that sheet clean and in fact now the Daiichi accident cost more than Japan ever saved by running 50 nuclear power plants. I see some people taking notes from my slides. We will post this up online and probably leave a copy with Les as well, so that way you’ll have a copy of the Power Point. And the other piece of it, that half a trillion dollars, that’s just money. In addition, there’s going to be about a million cancers as a result of Fukushima Daiichi. And there’s no value you can place on a human life to ever make this equation work out correctly. So we started with uranium waste, and then we’re talking about the nuclear power plant itself. And then moving on, what are you going to do with the waste material after you’ve burned it in a nuclear reactor? This is a nuclear fuel pool and it actually does glow that color blue. It something called Cherenkov radiation. And I was up on the refueling pool at another power plant once and the lights in the room went out – a power outage, a short power outage. And it was really beautiful. The whole room was just bathed with this blue light coming up from the water. (23:52) But it’s truly frightening, too, because when you see that, there’s extraordinary radiation below that. So the water is used as a shield to prevent people from dying and then separately, it’s used to cool that. If one of those bundles – if just one of those bundles were to be lifted up into the air, everyone in this facility would die within an hour. That’s how much radiation is in one of those fuel bundles. This is a reprocessing plant in France. So the alternative to storing it in a nuclear fuel pool is to reprocess it. The French are trying to do it and they’ve had very poor results. They’ve contaminated the North Sea with liquid radioactive releases from this plant and a lot of the nuclear waste from this plant never did get recycled but are sitting either in France or in Siberia waiting for someone to figure out what to do with this waste. So it’s presented as a nuclear fuel cycle, as a circle, but in fact, it’s a flat tire. There’s a great movie – and if you’re going to watch one movie on nuclear power, it’s this movie Into Eternity. And it talks about waste disposal. After you’ve got this nuclear fuel out of the reactor, the theory is that you’ll put it in the ground and keep it there for 10 half lives. And the half life of nuclear fuel is 24,000 years. So 240,000 years it has to be stored in the ground. And this movie explores that concept of how do you store something for a quarter of a million years when the United States has only been around 250 years? Essentially written civilization has been around for about 2,000 years, maybe 3,000 years. And yet the human hubris is such that we want to believe that we can store this for a quarter of a million years. There’s an alternative to this. And I like to use the analogy of a tree. Now a tree doesn’t have 2 or 3 really big leaves that generate all of its energy. A tree has got thousands of small leaves that generate its power. Well, the old way we made power in the last century was to have a couple really big leaves on our tree. But the future doesn’t look that way to me. The future looks to be thousands of small sources of power, each feeding into what’s called a distributive grid. Today’s energy starts with a large power plant, and that large power plant feeds everything. Tomorrow’s energy, in your lifetime, you’ll see power plants in neighborhoods, you’ll see power plants in small industrial facilities, and you’ll probably see a few large central station power plants as well, all feeding each other. And what the difference has been is the computer. The computer has allowed us to integrate this power grid so that the solar array on my house can talk to the solar array on somebody else’s house. When somebody needs power, there’s power to send. It’s called distributive generation. And in the 21st Century, it’s very likely to be the way that power will be generated. So you know the drill on these distributive sources, I’m sure. There’s wind power. And there’s a lot of different sources. There’s the traditional three-bladed machines that you see. But there’s also wind turbines that are being developed, which have a little less visual impact on the environment. Wind power is one source. Of course, you know solar. This was cool because this person came up with a wind/solar hybrid on the theory that when it’s not windy, the sun is out and when the sun is not out, it’s windy, which is true most of the time. There’s a couple of other sources that are worth thinking about in the future. There’s small hydro. Small hydroelectric. Right now we get our power from large hydro, largely from Quebec, but also on the Connecticut River. But small sources of hydroelectric. But also up in Ontario, they’re looking at wind turbines under water essentially; water turbines. And they would sit underwater and as the river flows through, they would spin and generate electricity just as if the propellers were pushed by the wind. And of course, waves are another possibility. As these things float up and down, they would generate power from the wave action, being lifted up and down would spin a generator that would make power. Right here in Vermont, we’ve got a renewable source and that’s the McNeil plant. You ever seen the McNeil plant? Anybody from? No. That uses biomass and it’s burned in a plant. And while it creates carbon, it’s different than the carbon that comes out of a coal plant because the trees have absorbed the carbon from the air and that carbon then McNeil puts it back up into the air. McNeil doesn’t introduce any new carbon into the air, like digging coal out of the ground, which was from some dinosaur a couple million years ago – actually, not a dinosaur, Les – probably a plant. Anyway, that coal had trapped that carbon in its underground. So when you burn that coal, you’re introducing new carbon into the air. McNeil doesn’t do that. McNeil takes carbon from trees above ground. And they’re sustainably harvested, by the way. And then burns them not releasing any new carbon into the atmosphere. Other ways of course is geothermal. Iceland gets a large portion of its power from geothermal energy. Now Vermont may have one source. There’s - actually, there’s a source on the Connecticut River of very hot groundwater, but in general, we don’t think of geothermal in Vermont. And the last one here is fuel cells, which convert hydrogen directly into water and in the process, the only thing they give off is water and electricity. So all of these are in the mix for the future. There’s a fuel cell technology out now that’s about the size of a pick-up truck that would run a neighborhood on the order of a couple hundred houses and so we may wind up with fuel cells in our individual neighborhoods running on hydrogen, emitting water and electricity. Now the real question, I’m sure you’ve heard it. What do you do when the sun does shine? What do you do when the wind doesn’t blow? And that calls for the last piece of this puzzle which is actually being commercialized as we speak. How do you store sunlight? How do you store wind power to get you through when those parts of the cycle that are – when the wind isn’t blowing. Well, my question to you is would you rather store nuclear waste for a quarter of a million years, or would you use that same intellect to figure out a way to store electricity overnight? To me, the choice is clear. I’d rather develop sources for storing power. And we’re actually seeing that as we speak. A nuclear plant costs around $5,000 a kilowatt to build. You can get solar at about $2,000 a kilowatt. But of course, the sun isn’t always out. But the storage is now down at around $1,000 a kilowatt. So solar plus storage is now less than nuclear power. And that’s a fundamental change. And that’s one of the reasons why the world is moving away from these large central plants to solar on the roof, solar in the business, solar actually we’re talking about in the windows of homes. Another possibility for storage is something – you’ll hear about this in the future – V2G – V2G technology is vehicle to grid. You’ll have an electric car and when you’re home, you’ll plug it in. So the grid is sending power to your car. When the grid needs power, if you don’t need to use your car, you authorize your car to send that power back to the grid. So vehicle to grid, the battery in your car that gets you to work or to Johnson State, when you get to Johnson State, you plug it in. (33:05) The car charges when the wind is blowing and discharges into the grid when the wind isn’t blowing: vehicle-to-grid technology is already being worked on. Another possibility is using the electricity to compress air. And the compressed air would be put in large underground caves, caverns. And then when the wind isn’t blowing, the air comes up and spins the turbines well. Another storage mechanism. Another storage mechanism is using a flywheel. When you were a kid, did you ever one of those – this is a boy analogy, I’m sorry – one of those little cars – whizzzz. You’d set it down and it spins. When you would get that car going, that noise you would hear is a flywheel that you’re winding up. And then when you let it go, the car moves. Well, flywheel technology is like that, too. When the wind is blowing, a flywheel is spun up. And so that when the wind is not blowing, the flywheel gives back that energy to the grid. What this does – this concept of distributive power minimizes transmission losses. Vermont Yankee is 100 miles away from here and 10 percent of the power from Vermont Yankee is lost in the transmission lines. So what this does, by having the power where the load is – solar power on your roof – you don’t lose that power. There’s no transmission losses. So by going to a distributive system, you wind up picking up 10 percent right off the bat, because you’re not using a large central station power that’s far away from the grid. That’s an important piece of the puzzle going forward. And all of this technology already exists. I use Japan as an example here because they shut down – after the accident, they shut down 54 nuclear plants and they have right now no nuclear plants running. And life in Japan goes on. The first thing they did was conserve. And I was there twice in the last year, and in the summer, their buildings were at 80 degrees. That’s a lot warmer than one would expect, but when you realize it’s 97 outside, it still is a pretty dramatic reduction. But we can do that better. Light bulbs, more heat efficient buildings, turning the heat up in the summer, turning the heat down in the winter is the first thing we can do. And anybody in this room can do that. We don’t need to be high tech to succeed at that. But I looked at Japanese manufacturers and found out that Sony was developing wind power all throughout Japan. Mitsubishi and Hitachi were working on heat pumps all throughout Japan. Toyota was working on solar power all throughout Japan. So all of these technologies are available in Japan but had been prohibited from going on the grid by a very powerful electric monopoly. Well now, since Fukushima Daiichi, the game has changed and the monopolies are caving in and more of these sources of power are allowed to enter the grid. This is what I would call the energy success story of the last three years. The Germans shut down 9 nuclear power plants right after Fukushima Daiichi because they were of the same vintage as Daiichi. And then the other 20 roughly are going to be shut down in the next 20 years. Well, October 3rd, two weeks ago, Germany generated 65 percent of its peak power from renewable sources. That’s windmills and solar on the peak of the day, midday, they generated 65 percent of Germany power. This is not a third world country. It’s one of the largest exporting countries in the world. And they had literally the other power plants had to either shut down or export out of Germany because the Germans had 65 percent. For the day. For October 3rd on a whole, 33 percent of their power came from renewable sources. So the Germans are well on their way to figuring out how to do this, how to get distributive network. And are there hurdles? Sure. But are there hurdles to nuclear? I think Daiichi showed us, yeah, there’s a lot of hurdles to nuclear that we have yet to conquer. So when a utility, a large utility says well, how are we going to do this, the mentality of that institution is, the only way to generate power is a large central station with a transmission line to your house. In fact, the Germans and other nations – but Germany is the point person here – are actually showing that in fact there are alternatives. This distributive generation of power is likely the way to go. And if the Germans can do it in Germany, they’re going to make a heck of a lot of money throughout the world. Because other people are going to want it, too. There’s a chance to make money here, which is what I told the Japanese. I wrote a book. This is another thing a carpenter’s son never thought he was going to do. But the title is: Fukushima Daiichi: The Truth and the Way Forward. And we talk extensively about the fact that the Japanese have the opportunity to wean themselves from nuclear and become an export powerhouse on renewables if they choose to. Okay. To conclude, let’s go back to the Robert Frost poem. “Two roads diverge in a yellow wood. I’m sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler. Long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth. I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere in ages and ages hence. Two roads diverged in a wood. And I – I took the one less traveled. And that has made all the difference.” We’re at that junction in the road and there’s an opportunity here for the United States and the world to choose a different route than we did last century. And I believe that that route will be renewals for the distributive generation system. All right, well thank you and let’s take some questions.