191st CityLaw Breakfast: Matthew Ketschke, President of Con Edison of New York

Wow, so thank you Ross. One I just learned that I'm going to have Ross write my resume for me because he makes me sound much more interesting than I think I really am. So thank you for the opportunity to come here today and address this group. So ConEd and New York Law have a couple things in common. I think one of the biggest ones is that we are really part of the long-term fabric of New York City. ConEd has a long relationship with New York Law; we have a number of alumni who have both worked for the company and continue to work for the company. And it's a big part of kind of being a New Yorker. These are foundational New York institutions. So being that you're all New Yorkers and going to be an active audience, I'm sure I got a question for you: how many people this morning started a day with maybe a warm shower, hands, cup of coffee, took a subway ride, sat at a traffic light?

So whether you know it or not, the 10 million people who live and work in New York City use energy every single day. It is foundational to how we live a life in a vertical like New York. The people of ConEd essentially power New York City, and most people don't know that we do it every single day, and actually we kind of like it that way. If the lights stay on, if your apartment stays warm, if the subways keep running, that means we're all doing our jobs very well. But ConEd is essential to the city. We are about 13,000 people who pretty much all live and work in New York City that make up ConEdison. We're a growing company. Last year we hired 1,700 new people to address all the challenges that Ross laid out. We added 1,700 new employees, and they were from New York, over half of them were from disadvantaged communities around the New York City area, over 70% of them were people of color. We are New Yorkers. We live and work here every day, and we represent the city that we serve.

We are a pretty big company. ConEd is one of the larger investor-owned utilities in the United States. We serve New York City and Westchester County with electric, gas, and steam service. We are actually the last investor-owned utility that's headquartered, electric utility headquartered in New York. So ConEd, thank you. All of the other investor-owned utilities in New York state are actually owned by foreign entities. ConEd we are part of the city, we are here, and we have been here for a long time. ConEd's history is pretty long. We have been around for over 200 years, 201 years. We are the oldest continuously traded stock on the New York Stock Exchange. One of the things about ConEd and serving a city like this is we're in this for the long haul, the long duration. Sometimes people ask me, they look and go like, I kind of know my history, how could you have been around for 201 years if Edison invented the light bulb in 1876? That doesn't make sense. ConEd actually started as a manufactured gas company, a gas lighting company, one of the first gas lighting companies in the United States. We were incorporated 201 years ago, and our first product was lighting gas, manufactured gas actually made from whale oil. We're going to talk a little bit about sustainability today. You want to talk about non-sustainable fuel, think about using whale oil to make gas to light your home. That's really a non-sustainable fuel. We've evolved a lot since that time.

The company I work for today serves over 10 million people. We provide electric service to 3.3 million customers, over 10 million people. It's all of New York City with the exception of a little tiny part of the Far Rockaways, and Westchester County. We provide gas service in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Westchester County. And we provide steam service in Manhattan south of 96th Street. We have what is the largest district steam heating system in the United States. If you ever see a movie set in New York City, you'll see that kind of iconic picture of a New York City taxi cab driving through a steam cloud. That's iconically New York, that's our steam system at work. And it serves 1,500 of the most iconic buildings in New York City, places like Grand Central Station, Empire State Building, Chrysler Building. So as Ross said, I've been doing this for a long time. I've been working for ConEd for 28 years, I've done a number of different jobs. It's a fantastic place to work. But a lot is changing in the energy industry. So we've been around for 200 years, I dare say that more is changing in the energy industry today than at least anytime in my tenure, and likely anytime in our recent or even longer term history.

So what is driving that change in the energy industry, this product that every single one of us uses every day that most people don't think about? What's changing that, and what's making it change quickly? It's really a couple things. I'd say one is climate change. Climate change is real, it's here today, and the need to think about climate change and the impacts both of climate on us today and as we go forward. The second thing is driving climate change is increased levels of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. How do we think about greenhouse gas emissions? The reality is that energy – how we use energy, how we produce energy every single day – is one of the significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions across the world, and that's no different for us here in New York City. So greenhouse gas emissions, and then changes in technology. Technology has advanced rapidly: how we make energy, how we move energy, how we store energy, and how we use energy is changing rapidly with changing technology. So climate change, public policy, and changing technology are the things that are really driving rapid change in the industry I work in. One of the analogies I use is our business is essential to life every day. We want people not even think about it – turn the lights on, the lights come on. But we're going to have to evolve the systems that power New York City and Westchester County and do it on the fly. It's kind of like changing the jet engine on a plane in flight. How do you think about evolving these systems as you continue to maintain every day reliability, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year?

So as we think about public policy, what is the public policy that's driving some of this change? What is the government doing that's saying how do we change this? It's really a couple big things. At the state level, it's the CLCPA, or Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, that was really nation-leading legislation that was passed in New York a couple years ago to think about climate change and how it's impacting our state, and essentially codify in state law a requirement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions statewide for the entire state economy down to net zero by 2050. That's a huge change in how energy is going to be used, how transportation is going to work, how agriculture is going to work, how industry is going to work – completely remaking our economy to make it essentially net carbon neutral by 2050. That's a huge challenge. At the more local level, probably one of the biggest drivers is Local Law 97, which really looks at our buildings and how do we think about our stock of buildings and decarbonizing buildings.

Across the United States, CO2 emissions come from probably three biggest categories. Production of electricity and use of electricity is one of the biggest ones across the country. It's actually a little bit lower in New York. New York already starts out being a pretty low emissions location. How we heat our buildings is one of the second ones. So heating of buildings – that's actually the largest CO2 emissions category in New York City. So our building stock, and think about the venerable building stock, these historic buildings we have – how we make them less impactful on the environment. And the third area is transportation. So for a lot of the country, transportation is one of the largest sources of CO2 emissions. But if I asked who actually drove here by private car today and parked in a big parking lot, as New Yorkers we don't, we use a lot of public transportation. We're pretty efficient as it goes to transportation, so transportation is a little bit low for New York City and Westchester County as compared to the rest of the country. But thinking about the impacts of climate change is going to be how do we decarbonize the production of electricity, how do we reduce the amount of fossil fuels that go into heating our buildings, and how do we electrify transportation and decarbonize all three of those to get down to net zero CO2 emissions for the entire state.

There are some other big drivers in the state that don't affect us so much here in New York City. Heavy industry is one – we don't have so much heavy industry, so it's less of an issue for us here in New York City. And then agriculture – there's not that much agriculture in New York City either. So those are two of the other big drivers, but transportation, building stock, and electricity are really the keys to how we think about decarbonization to address climate change. So what is climate change? You know, it's not an abstract concept for us. Climate change is here and it's here today. Ross talked about kind of the arc of my career, and one of the big things that happened to my career was Hurricane Sandy. How many of you were here in New York for Sandy? It was a monumentally impactful event for New York City. Something odd happened with Hurricane Sandy that hurricanes aren't supposed to do – it turned left. The hurricane came up the east coast and turned left and slammed into New York. That's not supposed to happen. That's just indicative of what we are increasingly seeing, which is climate events which are outside of the range of what we've historically seen – historically high rainfall events, historically hot spells, and historically cold spells – kind of more volatility in our overall climate.

As a company that operates energy infrastructure that's absolutely critical, how do we think about dealing with climate change? It's really in three parts. Because the reality is climate change is here today, we are seeing increasingly volatile weather events, and we have to deal with them. The three ways we think about doing that is first by applying science. You know, what does the climate say? And this is a place that we get help. We did an industry-leading study with Columbia University looking at climate impact and the vulnerability of our systems, climate impact not only today but the climate we expect to see over the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. As you walk out, you're going to see there's actually a substation right across the street from here. This is a Blenard Street substation that supplies this area. That substation went into service about 80 years ago at that location. We continue to upgrade, enhance, and reinvest in it. But assets that serve energy needs are long-term assets. We build them for the long term. These are not things that are throwaway; they typically will serve 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years. So as we think about building our systems, we have to build them both for the climate of today and the climate of tomorrow because they are long-lived assets. So looking at climate science to say what is the climate today and what's it going to be, and then how do we build our system? We think about doing three things. The first is to harden our systems. How do we make them harder and harden them against the impact of storms? One of the things we saw during Hurricane Sandy was an incredible storm surge that rolled into Lower Manhattan and overtopped a number of facilities and flooded out a number of facilities. Hardening basically is how do we enhance our survivability to increasingly volatile storm events, whether that's flooding, winds. We expect probably in the next 20 years the climate of New York in the summertime is going to feel more like the climate of Huntsville, Alabama. We're going to see more hot, humid days. So how do you harden our systems? That's investing in things that can withstand greater temperature variation, stronger winds. But the reality is you can't harden everything. You cannot make everything bulletproof. So the next piece is mitigation. How do we think about minimizing the impact when those events really come, so it affects the fewest number of people possible? Ways we're doing that is by segmenting parts of our system. How do you cut off the parts that are, for example, in a flood-prone area where if it's going to flood and you can't keep all of the ocean at bay, you can segment that portion off so it doesn't impact the larger parts of the system? We've been pretty successful in doing that. During Sandy, we saw most of Midtown Manhattan South was out of power for several days because of the impact beyond just the immediately flooded area. So segmenting our system – hardening, mitigating by segmentation, and then responding. How do we make sure that we have enough resources on the ground so that we can respond when a storm happens? We've built a storm center up in Rockland County that we can fly in up to 400 linemen staff, 200 bucket trucks that are on standby, flying from any place in the country to be able to respond once you've had a storm event. So as we think of climate change and for the ConEd system of energy delivery, it's really how do we harden it, how do we mitigate the events when they happen realizing you can't protect everything, and then how do you make sure you have the right resources to respond?

But climate change, it's going to go beyond just the impacts. It's how do we mitigate the impact that we're having now, and that's how do we think about reducing overall carbon dioxide emissions from energy? One of the ways to do that is we think about beginning to use more and more renewable energy. In New York, we already have a lot of renewable energy and non-carbon dioxide emitting energy. We have some of the biggest hydro facilities in the world that are up in Northern New York State along the St. Lawrence River, Niagara Falls. A lot of that flows down to the New York City area by transmission lines. But today, a lot of the power generated in New York City is still from fossil fuel, predominantly natural gas. One of the ways that we are working to address that and working with the state is by trying to build out more and more renewable generation. The best resource that we have downstate is actually out in the Atlantic Ocean – offshore wind. The ability to build offshore wind farms that then come into New York City. So one of the investments that we're making is in a substation in the Brooklyn area, actually on the site of a former fossil fuel power plant, where we'll be able to integrate over 6,000 megawatts of offshore wind brought in from the Atlantic Ocean and then moved out to growing areas in Brooklyn and Queens where we see load growing today.

So talking about climate change and what the company's doing, there we operate three different businesses. So we are a steam system, a gas system, an electric system – really kind of a portfolio of energy solutions that help serve our customers. And I want to talk a little bit about the future of each of those systems and how it's going to change. So we'll start with the smallest, our steam system. Most people don't even know that we have a steam system, but it does serve 1,500 customers. 1,500 sounds small, except it's all of these really big buildings – Grand Central Station, Rockefeller Center, these huge iconic buildings in New York City. Our steam system is actually extremely efficient today. We use predominantly natural gas to make steam that heats buildings, and as a byproduct we make electricity. It's actually one of the most efficient ways to both heat buildings and make electricity that we have today. As we think about decarbonizing the city and think about changing, one of the things is can we make all these buildings all electric? It's going to be really hard to electrify some of these legacy buildings. So the 1,500 or so customers that we serve with their steam system, we think it's actually going to be much easier to decarbonize all the way back at the power plant level, to be able to change how we make steam without using fossil fuels or CO2 emissions, to essentially lower overall carbon dioxide emissions and not have to have an iconic building like Grand Central Station tear out all of their existing heating equipment. There's some new technology that we're deploying to try to make that happen – high efficiency heat pumps, the plant using carbon capture at the power plant level, potentially burning hydrogen made from renewable energy at the power plant level, and renewable natural gas that's made from biowaste. So all of those options are ways that we think we can decarbonize steam production and make it much easier for these iconic buildings in New York City to lower their overall carbon footprint at the power plant and steam plant level, as opposed to trying to do it at the building.

The second system that we operate is a natural gas system. Our natural gas system is a big system – it serves over 1.1 million customers today. There's been a lot of talk, particularly in New York, about how we need to move off fossil fuel. And as an energy executive, as a ConEd executive, I agree we need to move and decrease our overall impact on CO2 emissions and climate change. We're going to need to burn less and less fossil fuels, including natural gas, over time. So this is a little unusual for an executive of a company that runs a gas company, but I think we're going to sell less gas, and we're going to continue to sell less gas over time. We think our natural gas system will shrink and serve fewer customers with less overall gas throughput over time. Um, that said, we haven't quite hit that tipping point yet. So just this winter, in January, you might remember the third week in January, we had a real cold snap in New York. Overnight temperatures got down around 15 degrees. On that night, we moved more gas to our natural gas system than any day in our history. So while we may talk about that the energy change is coming and the move off fossil fuel is here, and as an energy executive I'm working to make those things happen, one of the things we have to focus on with our natural gas system is maintaining the safety and reliability of that system as we go through this transition. The natural gas system is absolutely critical to life here in New York State today, and we think it's going to evolve and change. I think there are probably two different pathways, and it's not clear to me yet which pathway we'll be on with natural gas. Both of them involve less and less carbon dioxide emissions from natural gas and selling less gas and less utilization of the gas system. The divergence really is: do we electrify everything, do we move everything to electricity and move completely away from natural gas and other fossil fuels? That's kind of the full electrification scenario. The second scenario is do we look at a hybrid solution where you use the natural gas infrastructure to flow a non-CO2 emitting gas, so biogas – this is gas that's made from things like biowaste or sewage plant sludge – or synthetic methane made from renewables. What you have to believe in that scenario is that the technology to develop those at scale really works. But the benefit of the hybrid solution in selling less gas but still using your natural gas infrastructure is that you can minimize how much electric infrastructure you need to build to meet the peak demand. So one scenario we think is a hybrid solution, kind of saving the gas system but shrinking it way down, delivering less fuel through it but having that be a non-CO2 emitting fuel. The second scenario is we electrify everything and fully wind that system down, except for a few customers like hospitals and other things that really need some kind of fuel to burn. It's not completely clear yet that the technology is going to be there to make a non-CO2 emitting fuel at cost, but places like the Department of Energy and others are working on that.

The third commodity we have is electric, and what most people think of ConEd as electric. That's kind of our biggest commodity. We serve 3.3 million customers with our electric system. It is the most reliable electric system in the United States. It is an incredibly complicated system. We serve our customers about 10 times the reliability of the US average. If you live in New York City, you likely will see an outage about once every 20 years. If you live in a lot of the rest of the country, you would see one about once every year. So we have an extremely reliable system. It's also an extremely energy dense system. There are parts of Midtown Manhattan around the Rockefeller Center area where the load density is 1,000 megawatts per square mile. Just for reference, the entire combined state of New Hampshire and Vermont, that's about what the load is of the entirety of those two states combined. So in one square mile, you have what two states' worth of people use. So it's an incredibly dense urban infrastructure that we serve. That system works incredibly well, but we're going to need to think about evolving that system as we transition. One way is this integration of more renewables I talked about – how you bring more renewable energy in, and then how do we serve more and more end-use energy needs with electricity. So today, our ConEd electric system hits its peak, its maximum utilization, in the summertime because what drives our system capacity, what drives how big our system needs to be, our maximum utilization, is essentially on the hottest, muggiest, stickiest, nastiest New York City summer day – air conditioning load. As we think about moving forward in time, that's going to change because as more and more buildings heat with electricity, we're going to shift back to being a winter peaking utility. So in the 1950s, ConEd was a winter peaking utility. We think sometime in the next decade, ConEd will shift back to being a winter peaking utility as we move more and more heating of our buildings – which I said is the biggest driver of CO2 emissions in New York City – off of fossil fuel, off of gas, off of oil, and move that onto electricity. Our systems will shift from a summertime peaking to a wintertime peaking. As it moves through that, then we're going to see significant increases.

In demand, so as I mentioned, if we move all of the fossil fuel off of how people heat their buildings, if we eliminate all oil and gas from heating, our electric systems probably need to double in their overall size and delivery capacity. That means twice as many substations, twice as many cables in the street, twice as many generating sources to be able to provide that energy. What you need to believe in that scenario is that we figure out ways to store electricity for the long term. That's not easy to do. Electricity is a weird commodity. Electricity production and consumption basically have to match at the speed of light. There's not really good ways to store electricity. Every one of us now who walked in here probably has a cell phone that has a lithium ion battery, and the battery technology has really advanced in the last bunch of years. There's a lot of talk about battery pack Tesla batteries that utilities deploy to store energy. Those are really good, but they're really good at storing energy in a day and dispatching it later in the day, or in the morning, or in the middle of the day when the sun is shining, and dispatching at night when the sun doesn't shine. The biggest challenge to the all electrification scenario is that we will produce lots and lots and lots of renewable energy in the springtime and the fall when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, but it's not really or really cold in our buildings. So you have this overproduction supply in the spring and fall, and you'll have a shortage of capacity in the winter and summer when people are trying to cool their homes or heat their homes. So that is the biggest challenge: long-term energy storage. That's a technology that has not been solved for, and the technology we have to solve for. So as I sit here today looking for energy future, I think we're really dependent on two big pieces of technology that will support public policy. Can we figure out how to make low carbon fuels that we can flow through the existing gas system, or can we figure out how to make long duration energy storage that can backstop the electric system? That's essentially the divergence that we stand at today. When some other people will tell you and advocate that we have all technology today to fully decarbonize the energy ecosystem, we don't. The reality is we do not. Those technical challenges are real and ones that we're going to have to solve in the next decade or so to be able to keep our energy systems reliable. I'm really confident we'll be able to solve it. There are a lot of people working really hard at that, both ConEd and across the entire United States. In the near term, how we solve this is essentially the same path. So we have a full electrification pathway and a hybrid pathway. The near term is the same: we need to build out the electric delivery infrastructure today to be ready for the challenge of tomorrow, because under all these scenarios we still will use more and more electricity. For ConEd, that means we're building new substations and new circuits. We hadn't built a new substation for about 10 years. Right now we have four new substations in development that'll go in service in the next five years: one in downtown Brooklyn to help integrate offshore wind and move renewable energy, another one in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn to meet growing demand in that area, and then two out in eastern Queens to supply increasing demand around Kennedy Airport and the fleets of vehicles that are housed around the Kennedy Airport area, both for MTA buses and delivery fleets that will electrify. So building out electric delivery infrastructure is one of the key elements in the next couple years we're going to have to do. The second is maintaining our gas reliability while we continue to think about moving customers off, so making sure that we have the safety and reliability of that gas system is critical as we think about winding it down. And the third is going to be for our steam system, looking at how we continue to decarbonize the production of steam. That's essential and critical to some of the iconic buildings here around New York City. So as I said in the beginning, those challenges sound an awful lot like how do we change the jet engines on an airplane while we're in flight. I have a lot of confidence in our ability to do it, in large measure because of the people I work with at ConEd: 13,000 of the most incredible professional people who power this city every single day. We have an incredible team with diverse talent, skills, and ability, some of them being graduates of this institution, who help navigate through this increasingly complicated set of problems that we're going to have to solve, and that we really need to solve in a way that most New York City residents never know it was an issue, because energy again is an interesting commodity. It's essential to life, and a really good day for me as an energy executive is when nobody thinks about us. So Ross had warned me that this group often has lots and lots of really good questions, so I would really love to open up to questions from the audience.

Okay, so you live in a co-op that has what sounds like cogeneration, where you have on-site power production for the facility. Co-op City is a pretty good example. There are several around the city that have their own power generation and that are interconnected to ConEd. So it sounds like your question is less about the specifics of your facility, because they generate there, but that as we go through summertime periods, you hear ConEd in the news talking about energy usage in the summertime. So ConEd does have, statistically, and we've been awarded multiple years running for pretty much the last decade every year the most reliable energy delivery systems for electric of any place in the country. So we do operate a very, very complicated system, but the overall reliability of that system is higher than just about any place else you could go in the world. We serve New York City. So one of the things when we get to the summertime, and summertime today is when we see our peak energy usage. When it's really hot out, air conditioners crank up, and that's kind of our peak utilization. Because we want people to conserve energy, that's also when energy is most expensive and the highest demand. We will proactively go out and tell people, this is a good day, it's a peak day, good day to conserve. If you can modify your energy usage on the hottest summer day and shift non-essential energy usage to a later period of time, it lowers overall costs to all customers that they pay in the system. It makes the system a little bit more reliable, has some additional benefit to improving air quality because the last peaker fossil fired plant doesn't have to run. So there's a lot of reasons that we make announcements on those hot summer days for conservation. Most of them have nothing to do with that we have a brownout issue or a lack of capacity. The vast majority of time we have plenty of capacity. Occasionally we do have a failure, and that's with you know the employees will go out and get that fixed as quickly as we can. Ross mentioned a lot of how we serve New York City is underground. That makes us much more reliable because the wind won't blow the power line down, but it also makes it much harder to find a problem and fix it. When you have an overhead wire and an overhead wire comes down, it becomes very obvious where that problem is. If you have an underground system, when a failure occurs, the troubleshooting and doing that, and it's actually what I did at the very beginning of my career, is a little bit more complicated. And we also make local appeals to say, hey, you know, we have a little bit of a problem in the neighborhood, we're working on it, please conserve power to the degree you can.

Yes, so we've been in conversations with the DEP about what their plans are, the potential use for that, the ability to use that biogas either to blend into our existing natural gas system for natural gas customers or potentially in our steam generating facilities to lower the overall CO2 emissions from steam plants. So those are very large facilities relative to what's existed prior. They're an incremental first step in the production of biogas as we move forward.

Okay, so thanks for the question. Anybody who is ex-Navy nuclear has a great deal of pride in that program and feels strongly about nuclear. I did not mention nuclear in this. I have kind of other versions of this conversation where we do talk a little bit more about nuclear. The practical reality of the part of the world that we serve is a very dense urban infrastructure where ConEd-owned nuclear is probably not going to be part of the near-term solution. I do think as an engineer that nuclear, particularly some of the advanced nuclear that's being developed, is going to be part of the solution both internationally and across the United States. I think it's less likely to show up here in the near term given some of the demands and needs. That said, there are four big nuclear power plants that operate in New York state. The position we've advocated for is that those need to continue to operate in the near term because they provide a lot of clean energy. And that continued development of advanced nuclear reactors and what's called small modular nuclear reactors, which are a lot like the reactors that are on Navy ships, may be part of the solution. It's just probably not the solution that we will easily deploy in the New York City area in the near term.

Thank you. So I kind of generically lump together renewable generation into one category, but renewables for the near-term for New York City really means wind. And probably the best source of wind for New York City is going to be offshore wind off of the south shore of Long Island. That's probably the best resource available because the wind blows pretty consistently offshore and allows us to get large volumes of electricity. Solar is absolutely a part of the overall solution, both distributed rooftop solar that's integrated at distribution level and then large-scale solar facilities. One of the constraining factors for New York, and this was kind of focused on New York City, is our rooftops are often a lot smaller compared to the utilization. So if you think about how much energy this building uses and then how much space there is on the roof, it's not particularly big. And open space, land use, land is very expensive and valuable in New York City. So we're unlikely to have a solar facility in New York City that's of the kind of scale and scope. For scale purposes, a large-scale solar facility that might make a couple hundred megawatts of solar when the sun is shining is probably six or seven miles long and two miles wide. That would cover all of Central Park with solar panels and you'd get a little tiny piece of what the demands are for a place like New York City. So it's part of the solution. I think more large-scale solar will be built in the southwestern United States, more onshore wind will be built in places like Texas and Oklahoma, and more offshore wind will be built in places like the East United States. It's really tapping into those natural resources in ways that make sense as they vary across the country.

Yeah, so what Rebecca kind of talks about is how do we think about plugging new resources in. This is the concept of we're changing the engines in the plane while we're in flight. We're remaking how the energy system functions. Increasingly, the energy system, as you have more and more what are called distributed grid edge resources, are places where we're going to make power at or store power at the grid edge and reinject it and essentially share the resource. Those interconnections are coming at the grid edge, and there are more and more resources coming on. So how we effectively manage the interconnection of those grid edge resources and make sure that we get them in as quickly as possible but also as safely as possible is a key element. It's an area that utilities have been struggling with. The reality is we have always struggled a little bit with getting new service established to buildings. Typically, a New York City building will move up, it may be a couple year development cycle, and it's often the last step is making that point of interconnection for service. And now in many cases that's a bidirectional interconnection. There are some solutions that we've been working on to try to lower the friction in that. For small resources, we try to make it essentially check the box and you're done if you're not going to export a lot of electricity from the grid. Then you don't really need to talk to us that much and we can do that as quickly as possible. For resources that are going to export to the grid and make the grid flow bidirectionally, we want to make sure that we have both safety and reliability, so sometimes we have to study that. Increasing how we do those studies and try to do them faster with technology is a key element to that. But it's one of the challenges that we're going to have as we go through this process: making sure that we can get everybody plugged into the grid in a way that works. Electric is a funny commodity. You have to instantaneously match supply and demand. Unlike a lot of other commodities, if you sell out of Coke at the local bodega, you're out. You can't take more. Electricity is a funny thing. If everybody who wants it has the ability to take it, no matter how much supply is available, even if it overloads things. It's kind of like saying on Thanksgiving, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, if you went to LaGuardia airport, everybody who wanted to get on a plane could just pile on even if there's not enough seats in the plane. So the planning for that to make sure that we can match the capacity to the demand essentially falls on the grid planners, because in the absence of that, the lights go out or the plane crashes because you put 200 people on a 100-seat plane.

So there's a saying, as funny as the prior question came from a person who now works for a different company, Rebecca, who used to do this for a living and focus on this exact issue. ConEd has a pretty long history in energy efficiency. We actually have what was pretty much the first conservation program in the United States. It went in the 1970s. I can remember that, but a lot of people, I mean, a great many people, it was the ConEd Save program. Over the last 15 years, ConEd's programs have touched 2.5 million of our customers with ways to save and conserve energy, because a kilowatt hour of energy that's avoided is never produced. It's in a lot of ways the cheapest source of energy is to have efficiency, and in many cases it's absolutely the most environmentally friendly because you don't have to use any fossil fuel resources for an efficient use of energy. So we have significant energy efficiency programs. Over the next couple years, we're going to invest over a billion dollars in energy efficiency to encourage our customers to use energy more efficiently. And then there's how do we shift demand, how do we get customers to have the right incentives to say, hey, you know, the wind is blowing in a world with more renewable energy, the sun is shining, there's abundance of energy, so let me use it now and let me shift my usage to when energy is available or cheaper, and shift away from those times when it's more expensive or higher emitting. So the combination of energy efficiency efforts are key to the things that we think about, and then demand flexibility, moving people's energy demand from different times, particularly as we get more and more intermittent renewables as part of the supply mix.

Yeah, so one of the big challenges in getting people to adopt electric vehicles has been what is the availability of charging infrastructure. It's kind of this range anxiety or chicken and egg problem. I buy a new electric vehicle, if I can't charge it, it's a little bit more challenging. For New York City, because so many people in New York don't necessarily have private garages or driveways and park on the street, ConEd actually has what is the largest electric vehicle charging program in the United States. We are actually not going to be the owners of the charge head, so you won't necessarily pull up to a ConEd branded charge facility and charge. But we're working with third-party charge developers, folks like Tesla, EVgo, who own charging infrastructure, and we're helping them get those facilities built across New York City. Some of the highest utilization charge facilities for these developers happen to actually be in New York City right now. So this is something that we continue to work on and will continue to invest in as we work with private developers to build those charging infrastructure stations across New York City.

Okay, so maybe on the first question, the relative efficiency of New York City building stock. I mentioned New York City buildings, how we heat, cool, provide hot water in our buildings, is actually one of the largest sources of CO2 emissions in the New York City metropolitan area. Part of that is our building stock here happens to be a little bit older than some of the places you referenced. A lot of Europe, post World War II, was rebuilt in some of the urban areas. A lot of Asia has newer building stock. So the New York City building stock on average is a little bit older. The newer building stock is on average very efficient. But one of the challenges is going to be looking at some of those places like pre-war co-ops, buildings, and how do we modify the energy systems and installation of those systems to essentially improve them over time. That's a big piece of what our energy efficiency programs work with. A second piece of that is really driven by building code and standard. So we work closely with both state and local officials on what are the building codes and standards and requirements that are built in over time, and how do we implement those. So I think a big piece of your question was how does ConEd engage both state and local authorities on policy. We meet with both regularly. There's a state energy efficiency team that works with the state Department of Public Service and the New York State Research and Development Authority, NYSERDA. Those are probably the two biggest state agencies that we meet with multiple times a week typically at some working level on a number of these issues. And then New York City, we meet with a similar kind of hands-on on what are some of the policy issues and then how do we tactically execute on what they're trying to get done at a working level.

Yeah, so we kind of go through almost a continuous planning cycle. We refresh our long range plan in a 10 and 20 year planning cycle, in addition to our annualized execution plans that happen basically in a two-year cadence that we refresh. So we are continuously planning, revising the plans, looking at what's happening in the city, what's economic growth in the city, what are changes in public policy that impact us, and how do those things happen. Part of your question was around technology, hydrogen you specifically said. So we were a participant in the solicitation for hydrogen hub for New York state. New York did not get awarded one of the hydrogen hubs. We do plan for several different technology versions of clean energy. Hydrogen is one of those potentially clean fuels that you could potentially use and flow through your energy delivery systems. As an engineer, I have a lot of concerns about straight hydrogen flowing into buildings or flowing through the streets of New York City. One, you can't have hydrogen be a one-for-one direct replacement for natural gas. Hydrogen is very, very volatile. It burns from like 5 to 95% concentration in air. It's odorless. It's a much smaller molecule than methane, it would sneak out of pipes. So there's a lot of safety concerns that I would have around putting hydrogen into a building like this or into my grandmother's apartment. So there's a lot of safety concerns. Hydrogen is potentially a really good fuel to use in the industrial environment, places like power plants, where it's easier to control and make sure you have those safety protocols in place. Hydrogen potentially is a precursor to make synthetic methane. So if you could have green hydrogen, you can make synthetic methane that has a zero CO2 emission category to it, and then that's essentially a drop-in fuel, a one-for-one replacement for natural gas that you could utilize the natural gas system in that hybrid scenario. The benefit of that is that people don't need to change their appliances. If you started flowing hydrogen into buildings, you would need to change the appliances people use because the energy characteristics of the two fuels are different. I think the hybrid scenario with synthetic methane made from clean hydrogen is potentially a viable solution and maybe better for customers. As a utility, we probably don't really care in the sense that we serve customers with either commodity and we could make it work either way. But renewable gas through hydrogen potentially is a good solution for customers. And our natural gas system today actually didn't start as a natural gas system. We all call it the natural gas system, but it was a manufactured gas system. We've already changed the fuel that we flow once. I think we can change it again to a renewable synthetic natural gas.