JAY’S INTRO

As Tyler mentioned, I work upstairs like many of you. For the past year and a half it’s been my pleasure to serve on the Carolinas West Transmission team.

But for the past 2 years, I have hosted the Energy Cast podcast. My first episode was in March 2017 and my first guest was Duke Energy. So I like to say I interviewed Duke before they interviewed me.

There’s nearly 600,000 podcasts on iTunes. And a few of them talk about energy. But I don’t feel like they give equal respect to all forms of energy. Not much love for Nuclear, or Coal, or Oil & Gas.

So two years ago when there were only half a million podcasts available, ClimateCast was taken as a name, SolarCast was taken. Not Energy Cast. So I took it!

I think Climate issues are as important as anyone out here, but I think what’s more compelling a conversation is taking these dozen or so families of energy production, and discussing ways to eliminate their drawbacks. CO2 with fossil, renewable intermittency, the upfront expense of nuclear.

And when you remove some of those drawbacks, and recalibrate the math when it comes to the future of the portfolio, the choices are endless.

And that’s what we’re going to discuss today.

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BRUCE MCKAY

Our first guest serves as the Senior Energy Policy Director for Dominion Energy. He has been part of the company since 1995 when he was with Consolidated Natural Gas, they merged with Dominion in 2000. For 10 years he managed Dominion’s federal affairs office in D.C. He now manages the company’s strategies on the state and local level. He’s a North Dakota native but now lives just outside the beltway. Please help us welcome Bruce McKay.

RONNY JUST

Our second guest serves as the Governmental Relations Manager for Georgia Power, responsible for implementing statewide strategies around energy environmental issues. He served as Environmental Issues and Air Quality Manager for Environmental Affairs, and has been an advisor in a number of capacities on these issues throughout his career. He’s Georgian through and through, live in Atlanta, graduated from Georgia Southern. When I asked the Nuclear Energy Institute who I should invite, they told me this man. Please help us welcome Ronny Just.

PETE TOOMEY

Our last guest serves as Senior Vice President of Corporate and Regulatory Strategy for Duke Energy, where he is responsible for just that, as well as market fundamentals and load forecasting. He joined Florida Progress in 1984, which then became Progress, which then merges with Duke in 2012. He also had a brief stint in the 2000s at Allegheny Energy. Originally from the D.C. area, he’s a Charlottean by way of Florida. When we were planning this session and knew we needed Duke representative, they told me we had to get this guy and think you’ll agree. Please help us welcome Pete Toomey.

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1. This week I released an episode interviewing Ed McGinnis with the Office of Nuclear Energy at DOE, and the original pitch for this was SMRs. He made it very clear that he felt SMRs will likely play a dominant role in the future of nuclear energy. [PLAY QUOTE] How do you feel about that?

[Quote] “That is what nuclear energy is homing in on, and that is bringing in the Small Modular Reactors, that way utilities don’t have to bet the farm by deciding to go with a large nuclear reactor that may cost $6-8 billion per unit. Many utilities just cannot do that. The beauty of Small Modular Reactors is small can be large, you can scale up.”

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2. Southern Company’s representative is here today. I want to talk about Vogtle. In my McGinnis interview he also says he believes if we can just get Vogtle complete, we should have a much easier time building large nuclear projects in the future. Do you agree?

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3. Dominion Guest—I recently visited the Bath County Pumped Storage facility for a recent episode. Can you tell the audience what that means for the future of grid stability, especially storage?

And for the other Panelists, are we giving these large, 1,000s-of-MWh storage technologies like Pumped Hydro and Compressed Air enough attention?

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4. A lot of the public only thinks of energy storage as lithium ion batteries, for instance. Many of my guests like them too, but feel they’d best serve the public behind the meter. Do you agree or do you see a future with large-scale battery farms, essentially performing a generation role?

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5. Dominion Guest—Speaking of Renewables, you just broke ground on an offshore wind project. What does that mean for the east coast?

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6. Duke Energy Guest—My first episode was the Renewable Control Center. These are assets that are outside of Duke’s territory. What’s the advantage of an entity like Duke monitoring assets outside the territory?

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7. I’m in the Transmission group where I work. Tell me about the climate in your territories, because it seems like it’s more attractive to focus on investing in Transmission than generation at this time.

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8. Duke Energy Guest—When I first moved to North Carolina, I was surprised by the amount of solar in the region. We’re second only to California. How did that happen?

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9. Dominion Guest—You have an interesting waste-to-energy project, also in North Carolina right now. This is with Align Renewable Natural Gas. Tell us about that and why that’s so important.

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10. Southern Co. Guest—Years ago I was Executive Director of a carbon capture and storage association in Texas. About a year ago I met Frank Morton, the director of the National Carbon Capture Center, which is a DOE facility operated by Southern Company. Tell us what CCS means to Southern Company and why you guys have partnered to make this facility available.

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11. I also interviewed Bill Brown, who runs a company that just demonstrated a successful CCS plant that runs on Natural Gas [NetPower]. Even if coal were to disappear, is it important to address CO2 for gas-fired plants?

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12. I interviewed a Vehicle-2-Grid company called Nuvve out of San Diego. According to one study, cars sit idle 95% of the time, and about 150 cars could equal a 10 MW battery bank. Are any of you considering this?

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14. One more Nuclear question, and this is about closing these facilities early. Listen to this audio from Ed McGinnis. [PLAY QUOTE]. Do we all agree that closing nuclear plants prematurely is not good for the grid at large?

[Quote] “Vermont Yankee was closed prematurely, now the cost of electricity has gone up, look at the emissions generated...When those three nuclear power plants in Pennsylvania identified to close, including [Three Mile Island], it will have wiped out all of the wind and solar contributions for non-carbon emitting for well over 20 years.”

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15. I’ve asked a lot about experimental technologies, first-of-a-kind. Is it the role of a large utility to take risks like this?

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16. This discussion is “The Future of Energy,” and I always ask my guests how they feel about the dozen families of energy production. So could each of you summarize how each of you feel the portfolio should look in the future?

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