Captain Obvious

What a fun French phrase!  You no doubt know this originated when Yogi Berra witnessed Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris repeatedly hit back to back home runs.  The psychologist Edward B. Titchener in his book 1928 A Textbook of Psychology, explained déjà vu is caused by a person having a brief glimpse of an object or situation, before the brain has completed “constructing” a full conscious perception of the experience. Such a “partial perception” then results in a false sense of familiarity.   Scientific approaches reject the explanation of déjà vu as “precognition” or “prophecy.”  I have to admit I am suffering from this right now, despite the science that says it is not prophetic.

I have been told that the energy industry is like a big rock.  If you stand still in one spot around this rock, ideas will work their way around that rock and appear timely and correct again … you just have to wait long enough.  That certainly seems to be the case with distributed generation.  I can remember lots of things that were in vogue 20  and 30 years ago and now watch with amusement that today’s new crop of utility managers feel they are new and novel.

How soon we forget.

The electric utility industry started out as distributed generation and electricity was frightfully expensive.  It was only affordable to the rich and famous.  Before that, industrial firms located along rivers and used hydropower to provide mechanical work.  Farmers used windmills to pump water and to process grain.  Once electricity was invented, DC motors were employed to take this mechanical work and produce energy that could be moved more effectively through wires to the points needed.  Edison’s first power plant was a Diesel, engine-driven DC generator.  That was the beginning of the central station power plant and the only use was for street lighting.

The economy of central station power plants and the inexpensive delivery of that energy over the public highways of electricity distribution systems made the local generation by even rich people uneconomic.  That is, until fuel prices cycled through their low points and made it economically interesting for almost anyone to get into the business.  That has happened numerous times in the past.

Low natural gas prices in the 1950s spawned a series of projects, mostly using reciprocating engines since gas turbines were not commercially available in this format quite yet.  They were almost all abandoned within about 10 years once natural gas prices moved back up on to the fundamentals of fuel price parity.  Customers grew tired of tending to these maintenance and operational distractions.

Tax credits and a fear over our dependence on foreign oil spurred a bunch of projects in the early 1980s.  It is funny to remember that natural gas was banned as a fuel for utility power plants back then.  Check it out.  It was called the Fuel Use Act.  It was passed in 1978 and then repealed in 1987 due to low fuel prices.  Cogeneration was encouraged with PURPA in 1978 as well and persists today, but almost no one takes a really close look at today’s operational performance to see if it passes the minimum thresholds set by that legislation.  Today’s natural gas prices are so low no one cares.  It strikes me as somewhat humorous that today’s electric utilities are so quick to try to adjust their standby and backup tariffs when the first defense to illegitimate projects is the thermal standards themselves as the law exists.  Customers have no rights to fair standby or backup tariffs unless and until they meet these standards.

If you are old enough, you may also remember when the speed limit was reduced to 55 mph at the same time in the late 1980s.  With all the talk about energy efficiency and café standards, why in the world was that allowed to expire?  Oh, right, I forgot how inconvenient it was to travel at that speed.

Just recently, the speed limit on our loop around Atlanta (Route 285) was raised from 55 mph to 65 mph.  I think the reason was that no one was driving 55 mph on it anyway, so they might as well raise it.  It does make you feel better when you can do 65 mph because otherwise you are only averaging 5 mph during rush hour.

My biggest fear of déjà vu is that fracking now has us believing we are in for a long future of low gas prices.  It seems like no one believes natural gas prices could rise in the future.  I have been shocked to see electric utilities run to natural gas and abandon coal.  Where is the sense of portfolio risk management?   I get the environmental impacts, but I am troubled by the prospect that the abandoned coal plants will not be operable in the future.  The employees being let go cannot be replaced in any reasonable period of time.  The skills will be gone.  Coal is a very difficult fuel to burn.

It is amazing to me that we have forgotten the history of natural gas being at price parity with oil over the long haul.  Sure, we seem to have way too much natural gas here in the US at the moment.  Why isn’t anyone worried about that?  Does anyone realize what would happen if natural gas returned to its historical fundamental of price parity with oil?

So, let me give you a dose of reality.  Let’s assume today’s price for oil at around $100 a barrel is a good planning value.  There are about 6 million Btus in a barrel of oil.  Let’s make the math easy and say that oil is around $16 per  million Btu or about $1.60 per therm.  A therm is defined as 100,000 Btus.  Natural gas right now is less than one third of that.  Yes, oil is three times as expensive as natural gas.  What my friends do you think will happen when the supply/demand balance swings back to parity?  What would happen if just one environmental accident threatened the fracking industry in the US and shut it down, even just for a year or two?

Yep, you have it right.  Americans would be almost bankrupt in their home heating bills. Electric utility electricity prices would double almost overnight. It would be just about as bad as the market crash in the 1930s on our economy.  People would be choosing between heating and eating.

How can we sit so calmly today with the specter of this on the horizon?  I have asked this question to many leaders in the industry and they say “Joel, everyone in the fracking industry knows the success of it depends upon the industry policing out any chance of an environmental risk.”

Well, frankly, I don’t find that comforting any more than thinking about the vulnerability we have to terrorists in other areas.  All it would take then is for one malcontent to do something terrible here.

Let me therefore raise my concern.  My wife calls me Dr. Doom because I can always see the dark side of how things can go wrong.  I call it Cassandra’s curse.  Let me not dwell on this but just ask that you internalize what I am saying and take it to heart.  Stop arguing the counterpoint.

What if I am right?  How would you feel at some time in the future having not done what you should start to do now, and facing the ruin to the American way of life as we know it now?  Don’t you think you should be working to balance out the supply side risks by explicitly admitting this is a risk to everyone in the market?  How can you sleep at night without cautioning your customers that this is a national risk?  I hear so many other less significant risks being discussed all the time like energy efficiency and demand response.  This single unmitigatable risk could cripple the United States, and at a time we can least afford another financial setback.  Where is your sense of conscience?

I am not arguing against distributed generation.  I am only using it to point out how we tend to go around the rock.  We are going to work our way around this rock.  But, this time, when you say “It’s like déjà vu all over again” it won’t be funny as in Yogi Berra’s day.  It won’t be funny at all.

The recent scare by the IPC on global warming got me thinking.  It is about time we got really serious about this topic and, instead of worrying so much about carbon dioxide, let’s go after the big climate change agent: methane.  Most living organisms emit it when they ingest fiber so there are all kinds of proven culprits here including us.

Before we focus on our species, let’s take a quick look at two other known bad actors about which we can do something pretty easily: cows and termites.  I am so glad that really smart people have spent countless hours funded by you and me to take a closer look at this.  Here is one of their more recent published works: Cow Farts Have ‘Larger Greenhouse Gas Impact’ Than Previously Thought; Methane Pushes Climate Change.

See the study presented at the national science academy:  http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/11/20/1314392110.abstract

Now, you may be surprised to also know that our politicians thought enough about this critical issue to fund a study on alternative grasses that could be fed to cows to reduce their emissions.  Some naïve politicians suggested corks, but I have been surprised that someone hasn’t come up with a cow afterburner that simply sits on the hindquarters of the cow and sensing the emission by actions of the sphincter immediately fires up a catalytic converter to reduce the methane to the less harmful carbon dioxide.

I will not even begin to attempt to understand the wood burning fireplace folks who say that is carbon neutral.  Yes, I get that it wood is a renewable source of fuel, but I have to admit that somehow, despite my Masters in Chemical Engineering from one of this country’s top engineering schools, I still do not fully understand that burning wood in seconds is better than letting it sit around on the ground and eventually return as God intended: dust to dust.  Somehow the idea of converting this natural process which takes decades to instantaneous production of carbon dioxide is going to reduce global warming?  I think the math is flawed, but who am I do say.

So, let’s return to safer ground and get back to another critical critter: termites.  Critical thinkers will immediately include termites in the list of species we should eradicate.  After all, they have an extremely high fiber diet. Seems ironic that we have a huge industry in the US whose sole purpose is to get rid of these and they still persist.  Maybe we should no longer build our houses out of wood.  That’s it, let’s cut off their food supply!

Oh, and we are in the list as well.  After all, we not only respire (and therefore we should limit the population on the planet) but we are discouraged from eating fiber.  Maybe we should all be required to take Beano®.  This certainly lobbies against Mexican food in my mind.  Tragic.

I have to admit, I am having increasing difficulties explaining things that are intrinsically complex to every day folks.  The phrase that comes to mind is “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”  For example, everyday Americans simply have no patience for the truth when it is harder to understand than a nice simple lie.

It is easy to fail to see the truth when you do not speak the language of truth.  Math is like that.  This is why the State Legislature of Virginia once attempted to round Pi to 3.  As you progress through college and through graduate school as an applied mathematician, you are introduced to higher levels of abstraction that can tackle bigger problems but they also require conversance in the workings of that formulation.

It gets much worse when you tackle intrinsically complex subjects like heat transfer, reaction kinetics, and thermodynamics where concepts like entropy are introduced.  Isenthalpic processes are one thing but isentropic can just seem weird until you truly understand it.  There was a joke question back when I was in graduate school that went viral even before we had anything to transmit is that quickly.

The question was, is Hell exothermic?  You can check this out for yourself.  It is a true story.  A thermodynamics professor had written a take home exam for his graduate students. It had one question: “Is hell exothermic or endothermic?  Support your answer with a proof.”  Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law or some variant. One student, however, wrote the following:

“First, we postulate that if souls exist, then they must have some mass. If they do, then a mole of souls can also have a mass. So, at what rate are souls moving into hell and at what rate are souls leaving? I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for souls entering hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to hell. Since there are more than one of these religions and people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and all souls go to hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in hell to increase exponentially.  Now, we look at the rate of change in volume in hell. Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in hell to stay the same, the ratio of the mass of souls and volume needs to stay constant.

So, if hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter hell, then the temperature and pressure in hell will increase until all hell breaks loose.  Of course, if hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in hell, than the temperature and pressure will drop until hell freezes over.”

It was not revealed what grade the student got.  I think he deserves an A.  Frankly, I am prone to give a lot of people today an F … and you can quickly guess what that stands for.

April Fool!

We are all familiar with this quote from Mark Twain.  I open this article with it because it seems to capture the underlying feeling in the utility industry at this time.  While Jim Rogers, the past chairman of Duke Energy, has now come out and declared the traditional electric utility model dead, I am guessing that most in the electric utility industry are repeating Mark Twain’s words under their breath.

Jim Rogers is noted for pithy quotes.  One of my favorites is “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu!”  Since I have written extensively about customer engagement and key account strategies, I could not agree more.  Yet, at this time, utilities seem to be pulling away from that role and resorting to their age old tactic of trying to change the rules of the game to be more in their favor.

I am not surprised.  Today’s flat electric load growth and upward pressure on rates makes it very tempting to look for financial tweaks that move the operating financials in the right direction.  But these also tend to embitter customers who see them as combative and a sign of resistance to needed energy supply change.  Yes, these customers simply do not understand the issues and seem especially uninterested in looking at the realities of our energy future.  But, when you put these questions to a public vote, they tend to vote for the gradual pressure in upward rates to get these choices into the market!

And yes, all the engineers who know the details can easily criticize the reality of fuel cells.  After all, these were five years off back in 1985 when I was manager of machinery development at Mechanical Technology Incorporated (MTI) and were the first in the country to actually put them in cars. Now they are about five years off if you listen to some of today’s car companies.  MTI spun off that division which is now Plug Power.  We engineers love to point out why things don’t work.  But there are a few of us who can look past the reasons why things don’t work and see opportunities for new ideas that can be made to work.  Don’t tell me “no” … tell me “how.”  There is almost always a way to make an idea work.

I am reminded of the comparison between the way our space program and Russia’s space program solved the problem of designing a way to write in space.  Our scientists tried to come up with a ball point pen that would work in zero gravity.  The Russians simply chose to use a pencil.

In the beginning … the grid was Direct Current

I am going to bring us all back to one of these engineers who figured out “how.”  And, ironically it was out of a customer service glitch.  Thomas Edison shifted the emphasis at his research center to “get even” with his local utility because they were demanding payment of his overdue energy bills.  On one level Edison thought he did by inventing the electric light.  The gas industry (remember, lighting back then was done with natural gas) thought they were going to die.  So, they did what any free market company does … they thought they might as well invest in Edison’s company.  After all, at the time, the idea of using natural gas to make electricity wasn’t feasible.

Edison believed local electricity production and use should be direct current.  All of us in the utility industry know the legendary battles between his ideas and those of Tesla and Westinghouse.  Well, history teaches us that Edison lost the battle and we now have alternating current.

But, I want you to see how we may now have the perfect storm of ideas to bring Edison’s dream to reality.  Think about this for a bit with me.  Watch the difference between trying to accommodate the trends in energy technology today and how they get easier if we include a DC grid in with our current alternating current paradigm.

Solar and wind have grown significantly.  They may have received subsidies that are no longer “cost effective” but they have captured the attention and enthusiasm of the average American.  As this din of energy technology enthusiasm grows louder and louder and this just makes many incumbent energy providers cringe.  They were OK with solar and wind when they were small, but now want to change the rules given they are not so small.  Who pays for the transmission upgrades necessary to accommodate these new sources? Who pays for the balancing energy it is going to take to leave these resources in a must run status?  All of this puts upward pressure on electric rates.  Who pays?

Jim Rogers has recently said the traditional electric utility model is dead and that the future is a blank sheet of paper.  Well, I would like to suggest that there are three things the incumbents can do: watch things happen, wonder what happened or make things happen.  Perhaps it is time to make some things happen.

Think about all these new energy efficient technologies we now have. Light emitting diodes (LEDs) … DC.  Solar and wind … DC.  Electric vehicles … DC.   Variable speed drives … best and cheapest done with DC.  Electricity storage needs … best done with DC.  Distributed generation interconnection … best and cheapest when done with DC.  Microgrids and power reliability … best done with DC. The list goes on.

I am not suggesting we are going to do away with our transmission and distribution systems.  I am only suggesting that the “last mile of wire” might include … wait for it … think about it … DC.  And, I would suggest that the incumbent electric utilities start to think about how they can include DC in the last mile of wire to homes and businesses.

My boat has AC and DC circuits and an inverted to power the AC when the generator is off.  Power reliability is not a concern.  Why wouldn’t homes of the future have the same?  Wouldn’t this also make demand response at the home level incredibly easy to implement?

Transitioning to a Brighter Future

Obviously this is a very big idea.  There are lots of reasons it will not catch on right away.  There are a host of obstacles that preclude it from being a quick fix.  But, it clearly has legs.  Therefore, it deserves a demonstration project.

Yes, the devil is in the details.  Yes, this requires engineering.  But, some customers will pay for it.  Start there.  They will pay the freight.

Why not offer one to a big box retailer … say Walmart?  Why not try a model residential community that is all DC.  High end homeowners are looking for a way to be part of something truly new and exciting.  These are the same people who buy the EVs.

Who is going to be first here?  Who wants to go down in the history books?

I end with one more historic quote: “Things may come to those who wait … but only those things left by those who hustle!” … Abraham Lincoln

The cover of Time Magazine issue had an interesting article by Comedians Key and Peele titled “The Case for Mockery.” They claim we have changed our sense of openness in making fun of things and that has now thwarted a lot of creativity at the altar of political correctness. In a sense, their premise is that our inability to laugh at ourselves closes our minds to creative discussion and change. Their central premise is that certain groups are now bullying us into silence.

As I thought about this, it struck me that we have this bullying going on everywhere. I see it in our churches, politics, and even the energy industry. I believe the root to all of it is our tendency to be superficial. We are happy with our limited understanding just as long as the superficial sound bites satisfy our encapsulated dogmas and doctrines. Then, when we encounter others with different points of view, we become increasingly defensive about this and that. We have lost our sense of humor that perhaps, just maybe, we don’t know as much as we seem to think we know. Maybe new information might give us a bigger sense of the truth than the tiny portion of it we think we now own. As a result we become increasingly polarized and define ourselves by our unique perspectives.

I copied two of the most powerful quotes from the article into this blog to point out how obvious this is once you stop and think about it. Who can argue that we are now operating in a sea of political correctness where we can’t really call a spade a spade any longer?

Political correctness? Joel, are you kidding me? No, think about it. It has now become sacred to let energy zealots run the table on energy decisions in this country and, for that matter, around the world. Renewable energy is the new religion and they are on a crusade to replace the energy systems with solar and wind. Worse yet, the rampant inclusion of these sources without due consideration of the longer term financial and operational reliability impacts threaten the reliability and sustainability of the very system everyone in this country counts on. The bullying starts right here: People who think about this critically are called members of the flat earth society because their questions and concerns take the bloom off the energy zealot’s idealistic dreams. Sorry my zealot friends … that is bullying.

So, let me play Captain Obvious to anyone who truly knows anything about planning an energy supply system. You need both capacity and energy. You must have both and they must be there in balance. Disturb this balance and the lights go out. Sorry to destroy your simplistic energy doctrines and dogmas about renewables, but they are useless without real firm energy capacity … the kind provided by natural gas, nuclear, hydro and even coal.

Renewable energy sources are just that … energy sources. They are not capacity sources. They provide kWh but not kW. You need capacity sources to keep the lights on and you need an operational electrical grid to move the capacity sources to where the energy balance needs correction.

By the way, this grid was never designed with anticipation of these new sources and certainly not where they are being located. So, we don’t have the capacity resources located necessarily where we need them. Wind is often nowhere close to the load centers (population) and it is horribly intermittent. Solar sources can be located close to population centers but it is also often intermittent in many areas of the world. We need capacity to keep the lights on and the cost of that capacity has to be paid for by the users of the system in some equitable balance. And we need a transmission and distribution system that can accommodate the necessary flows while maintaining both voltage and frequency. By the way, the costs for this newly required capability is far from small and the existing ways these costs get recovered by no means charges the right people for the costs they are incurring.

So, as the article in Times Magazine points out, it is time to poke a bit of fun at the energy zealots for the obvious imbalance in their position. It is time to balance the electric rate making process to properly recover the true costs of including these new energy sources in the energy mix and from the right people.

But let me also point out that the conversational balance needs to also move away from the tone today which I would describe as a form of energy bullying. The energy zealots have not only gotten the microphone but they have dominated the agendas that result. They are also demeaning and failing to show respect for other points view. Tone it down please. Respect your elders.

Our society will not thrive if we continue to let this one point of view dominate the air waves. There is more to the story. There is more to keeping the grid reliable than what they are telling everyone.

If we fail to regain balance here, we are headed down a slippery slope of tragic energy decisions. We still have time in the United States.

Germany many have slipped into the abyss. Check it out if you are willing to face the complete truth:http://www.intelligentutility.com/article/14/02/2020-vision-look-european-electricity-market

Reddy or Not!?!?

No, that is not a misspelled word.  It is a play on words and a good key thought for this blog.  It reflects a serious question.  Is this the right time to change an electric utility paradigm?

I was fortunate to be asked to facilitate and analyze a two day private meeting of 23 electric IOUs (and in some cases combination gas and electric) about a year ago.  Setting aside all the politically correct positioning, the subject boiled down to how they could add back electricity marketing. Let’s just face it.  IOUs need more sales to absorb the recent cost increases.

Being that blunt is no longer acceptable of course, so you have to posture this more carefully.  You can’t call it beneficial electrification even though it is.  No matter how obvious the benefit, many IOUs are forbidden from helping customers reduce costs and improve their operations by expanding beyond their demand response and energy efficiency agendas.  Even professionals who manage electric and natural gas vehicle fleets inside these utilities were forbidden from talking to their customers who have large fleets of gasoline and diesel engines.  I want you to think about how silly this is.

In fact, since these fleet owners are so concerned about their environmental footprints and committed to embracing natural gas and electric vehicles, they pay to go to centralized meetings in other parts of the country so that they can talk to their local electric utilities about their experiences with these vehicles.  Please reread that again.  Can’t you see the silliness of this?

It is now politically incorrect to promote the use of electricity, even when it is clearly in the best interests of the customer and the serving utility.  It is OK for gas companies to do that (and they are) but electric utilities now have their hands tied behind their backs.  When are we going to wake up and call a foul on this attitude?  Isn’t there some middle ground here?  Utilities are not asking to dial up the old electricity marketing programs.  Is that what the regulators are so afraid of?

Perhaps it is helpful to look back a few years and see what we might learn from a time when things were different. Reddy Kilowatt is a brandingcharacter that acted as corporate spokesman for electricity generation in the United States and other countries for over seven decades. Reddy Kilowatt made his first public appearance on March 14, 1926 in an advertisement in The Birmingham News for the Alabama Power Company (APC). The character was the brainchild of the company’s 40-year old commercial manager, Ashton B. Collins, Sr.

Like other electric utilities of the period, APC was struggling with the need to grow the consumer demand for electrical power. site information . Commercially-viable generating stations had begun powering North American streets and homes by the end of the 19th century, but by the mid-1920s investor-owned utilities (IOUs) had achieved penetration in most North American urban centers. Ashton Collins was convinced that the best way to win over new customers, including frugal small business owners and skeptical farmers and rural dwellers, was to give his mostly invisible new commodity a more human face.

A human face.  Is that what we now need?  A new icon?  General Electric was in the power generating business and decided that the best way it could build its business would be to invent and market things customers could buy from them that “brought good things to life.”  What a lovely thought.  Improving the wellbeing of people.  How can you argue against that?  GE now has wind and solar in its generation portfolio, but it hasn’t stopped bringing good things to life.  They have moved on.

So, to support the regulatory agenda, it is probably a bad idea that we have all these modern conveniences.  It would be better if we washed clothes by hand and dried them out on a clothes line. I grew up in that world and I do admit the clothes smelled fresh.  But, they weren’t as soft, and certainly not as clean and neat.  Has our energy efficiency agenda stymied the progress of our society?  Have we defined success too heavily on never building another power plant?

The current energy strategy and planning dialogue is stuck in a polarized set of ruts.  If you are in the global climate change rut you see everything as solar, wind and natural gas.  You are not worried about how you keep the lights on with all these intermittent resources.  You are only worried about how much carbon you release.  If you are in the traditional electric utility rut, you are caught in a squeeze between accommodating all these new sources and paying for both their installation (through incentives) and operation (through preferential rate tariffs that shift the operating costs to others).  This was fine when these costs were small, but they are no longer that way.  In fact, they are now large enough to bankrupt several of the world’s largest IOUs.

Investor owned electric utilities are certainly stuck in their rut. Municipal and cooperative electric utilities may be stuck there as well.  Can they break out of it?  And, if so, what is their new game?  Can they move on?  In another blog I focused on the idea of moving towards a DC grid.  Check that out if you haven’t seen it.  Here I want to focus on another key idea Edison had.  It was that he thought you would never be able to sell electricity.  You would have to sell what customers wanted to get from it: heat, light, productivity, etc.  My next blog is a much more controversial approach: declaring the emperor is nude because he and/or she is nude.

Hmmm.  End use sales.  That isn’t really all that new Joel.  We have district heating and cooling plants that sell hot water, chilled water and steam.  Are you suggesting selling light?  Work with me.

Who really wants to worry about heating, cooling, lighting, or anything else in our homes and businesses?  Apartments in New York City often come with “free” heat.   Why not extend the traditional financing of homes to include comfort and simply “lease it to them?”  When you do that, efficiency and technology are a way to increase earnings for the investor.  Isn’t that what we really trying to do with market transformation anyway?

But some will immediately complain that people will abuse the freedom to set their own comfort levels.  You can cover that by careful design of the system so that customers are permitted the freedom to do that in the area of the house they want to be in but only if they reduce the comfort in other areas where they are not occupying the house.  If you are still arguing with me, please read the blog on Oh Vey because you are stuck in that terrible “we can’t do that” mode rather than the “how can we do that” mode that leads us out of this wilderness and to the promised land.

Plus as technology increases and costs continue to come down, think about how a home can automatically adjust.  I watched my satellite receiver automatically turn off when it sensed I didn’t touch the remote for more than two hours!  The NEST thermostat detects you are in the home as it considers how to adjust to your comfort target.  Lights in public places turn off when no one is present.  Can’t you see the trend here?  We are marching towards an intelligent interactive home where your comfort is no longer costly and your willingness to pay for it is going up in value.  This is the promised land.

But, just as in the Book of Exodus that describes the story of people wandering in the desert, the first views of the promised land.  There are giants in this land.  Is it time to truly dialogue with those giants?