[MUSIC] Let's talk how the Smart Grid applies to environment. While the nation's transportation sector emits 20% of all the carbon dioxide we produce, the generation of electricity emits 40%. Clearly presenting an enormous challenge for the electric power industry in terms of global climate change. Smart grid deployment is a key tool in addressing the challenges of climate change. Ultimately, and significantly reducing greenhouse gases and criteria pollutants such as NOx, SOx, and particulates. A smarter grid delivers and use conservation and efficiency thanks to its ability to establish more focused and pervasive consumer participation from a behavioral perspective. There is measurable energy savings when consumers participate. Approximately 6% in the residential sector. Awareness on the part of consumers to manage peak load by virtue of a feedback mechanism may incite greater attention to consumption patterns and result in savings. Proving that timing is everything, a smarter grid can capture carbon savings from peak load shifting even if energy is not being saved. When peak load is reduced by means of demand response many peaking plants and the carbon that they emit are kept on the sidelines. The Smart Grid's single biggest potential in delivering carbon savings is in providing cost effective and increasingly clean energy to plug in electrical vehicles including plug in hybrid electric vehicles. Although, the vehicles will be producing the saving rather than the Smart Grid, only Smart Grid technologies will allow us to tap the fundamental potential. The idle production capacity of today's grid could supply 73% of the energy needs of today's cars, SUVs, pickup trucks, and vans with existing power plants. Additional benefits include the potential to displace 52% of net oil imports, or 6.7 million barrels per day, and to reduce CO2 emissions by 27%. Furthermore, by enabling the sale of more electricity over the same infrastructure, the Smart Grid has the potential to lower electric rates. These benefits accrue, however, only if these vehicles are charged strictly off peak. Charging electric vehicles on peak would only further stress the grid. In terms of carbon emissions, the nation's vehicles produce a substantial amount of them. By moving their emissions from millions of tailpipes to far fewer smokestacks, the Smart Grid could dramatically reduce the size and complexity of the industry's ongoing clean-up detail. That is, rather than wondering how to handle hundreds of millions of four-wheeled emitters, Smart Grid functionality enables us to shift focus to challenges ranging from carbon management to the use of more renewable sources of electricity. Wide spread adoption of hybrid vehicles will cut greenhouse gases including CO2. In the process, it will work towards improving the general health of the United States as well as lessening our dependence on foreign oil. The full exploitation of renewable energy sources such as wind and PV solar, is critical to managing our collective carbon footprint. However, when viewed against the limitations of the current grid, both technologies phase barriers to full scale deployment. A Smarter Grid enables grid operators to see further into the system, and allows them the flexibility to better manage the intermittency of renewables. This in turn, surmounts a significant barrier, enabling wind and solar to be applied rapidly, and in larger percentages. So what is the next step? Action or inaction? If we do nothing, an environmental study shows that U.S. carbon emissions are expected to rise from 1,700 million tons of carbon per year today to 2,300 million tons of carbon by the year 2030. The same study shows that utilities through implementation of energy efficiency programs and use of renewable energy sources could not only displays that growth. But actually have the opportunity to reduce the carbon output to below 1,000 million tons of carbon by 2030. If we do nothing about engaging the consumer, we can expect to run out of both choices and time, drastically limiting our ability to meet future energy challenges. If we do nothing the incidence of massive and crippling blackouts will likely increase. If you do nothing, rates will increase dramatically to pay not only for electricity but also for increase transmission constraints, ever higher peak loads, and the mortgages on outdated assets. If we do nothing all of us will pay substantially more for the electricity, to say nothing about the resulting plight of those who can least afford to pay.
