Community Energy Discussed at Net Impact Conference, Portland, OR

I went to the Net Impact conference in Portland, OR a couple of weeks ago. Net Impact is a “new generation of leaders who use our careers to tackle the world’s toughest problems. We put our business skills to work for good throughout every sector. By doing so, we show the world that it’s possible to make a net impact that benefits not just the bottom line, but people and planet too.”

I volunteered for two four-hour shifts, which meant that I missed several breakout session time slots. I was, however, able to catch the last half of a session titled: Clean Technology Through Smart Policy.

Many of the ideas presented by two panelists and the moderator were very much in sync with the premise of this blog. (Panelists: Tom Osdoba, director, Center for Sustainable Business Practices, Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon, and Michael Jung, policy director, Silver Spring Networks. Moderator: Bryce Yonker, director of business development, Clean Edge.)

Here are a few examples:

Policy

• China and Europe all have energy policies. We don’t. There is no leadership from the top. Leadership is happening at the state and local levels.
• We need new policies and new service models for energy delivery.
• We have to change the conversation – we need to have green energy purchases be automatic for all consumers unless they decide to opt out. Right now people are only given the choice to opt in, and many don’t understand the short and long-term benefits of doing that.
• How do we create an environment where new, innovative, clean technology models can be successful? Most of us want to do the right thing – the challenge is to educate and engage consumers. We need to work through organizations that already exist and that consumers already trust to influence this change.
• Utilities are fighting change, but of all the utilities across the country, there are only about 100 big ones. We CAN influence 100 big companies!

Neighborhood Energy

• We need to redefine how we ask utilities to deliver – they need to do the same things, but on a smaller scale, for example, by creating neighborhood district utilities.
• We need to create whole energy systems, allowing savings from creating renewable energy and conservation through retrofits.
• Distributed generation — the generation of energy from many small energy sources — is scary to the utilities: Two-way power flow is scary. Yet point of consumption storage is much more affordable than storing electricity far from the customer. Why shouldn’t a consumer who is generating electricity at his house or commercial building purchase energy at an average price and sell it at peak prices?
• By the year 2020, 45 percent of renewable energy in this country will come from distributed sources.
• We need to create neighborhood-scale, clean-energy services. Give them an unfair advantage in the market. Help them aggregate and build to scale.
• Washington state is considering legislation that would create Climate Benefit Districts that would do just that — aggregate at the local level and build to scale, creating a different platform and putting the cities back in charge.

The conversation was really interesting and gave me hope that innovative solutions at the local level can eventually lead us to develop a nationwide patchwork of tens of thousands of local grids run primarily by clean, renewable energy sources.