Listen along with hosts Bill Nussey and Sam Easterby as six renewable energy experts share practical tips on what you can do to help get to a clean energy future faster. Plus, in this episode, we hear what inspired one retired Nike executive to help take on a giant utility and how he is helping to shape a clean energy future for Taos, New Mexico.
Our expert guests include:
- Anya Schoolman of Solar United Neighbors (original podcast here)
- Dr. Jeff Chamberlain of Volta Energy Technologies (original podcast here)
- Andy Klump, CEO of Clean Energy Associates in Shanghai (original podcast here)
- Emily Morris, CEO of Emrgy, a leader in distributed hydro (original podcast here)
- Peter Heintzelman, CEO of utility Cobb EMC (original podcast here)
- Roy Torbert of the Rocky Mountain Institute (original podcast here)
- Bob Bresnahan of Renewable Taos
Listen to this podcast and others in our series on these platforms:
http://freeingenergy.libsyn.com/ever-asked-what-you-can-do-to-help-get-to-a-clean-energy-future-faster
Transcript
Sam Easterby:
What can I do to help? Ever hear yourself asking that question when the topic of clean energy comes up? Hosts Bill Nussey and Sam Easterby share some practical tips from renewable energy experts on what you can do to help get us to a clean energy future faster. Plus, in this episode, we hear what inspired one retired Nike executive to take on a giant utility, and how he is helping to shape a clean energy future for Taos, New Mexico. This is the Freeing Energy Podcast, and these are the personal stories from local energy champions and leaders in the world of renewable energy that are shaping our future.
Hello, Freeing Energy Podcast listeners. Bill and I are here again today to talk about something very, very near and dear to us, and we’re going to focus on one question that over the past year as we’ve talked to people, has come up time and time again at the Freeing Energy Project. And that question is, what can I do to help get us to a clean energy future faster? And I recall hearing so many people ask you that Bill, that very question right after your TED talk here in Atlanta. What can I do to help? I know for me the challenge and complexity of energy and electricity make it all seem so insurmountable, but what role can individuals play in this critical transition to a clean energy future?
Bill Nussey:
Sam, I love the question. I’m excited to talk about this today. I’m really excited to share the contributions of several of our interviewees, because collectively I think that there’s some good insights here, some great insights here. And I think that collectively is part of the answer that has really become a possibility for the first time an energy history. You see for 120 years, the only way that electricity was affordable was we built these giant scale power plants, coal, and nuclear, and natural gas, and we distribute them over thousands of miles of transmission. And this was only workable by giant corporations and the government. And what’s happened in the last maybe 10 years, and really in the last two or three, was that for the very first time, in the case of solar and soon batteries, you can put these on your house, on your building, on your campus, and they can generate electricity for less money than you’re paying to get electricity from the grid.
So for the very first time, we as individuals have a choice. Because the electricity industry is a monopoly, and for good reason. So that the lack of competition enabled these utilities to raise enough money to build these giant risky power plants, and competition would have made it unlikely that banks would get paid back. So the original design of this monopoly was sound, but it doesn’t make any sense anymore because we have these local, inexpensive, cost-effective, reliable solutions that are available to us. So as individuals, we are now back in control of our energy future, our energy destiny.
It really reminds me of a quote by Robert Kennedy. He says, “Few of us will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It’s from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man or a woman stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lots of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sets for the tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep from the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Now, I think Robert Kennedy was talking about more noble and lofty goals than just inexpensive electricity, but the idea that he got at, which I’ve always loved, is that collectively small individual acts add up to make a massive difference. And for the first time in energy history, we as individuals can make a set of small decisions that collectively will change the entire landscape of our energy future.
Sam Easterby:
I love that quote from Robert Kennedy, Bill, and we’ve had some amazing guests on the freeing energy podcast over the past year. And we’ve asked each of those guests, how do they answer that question when they’re asked? Because it seems like every time we’re in an event or we’re at some public gathering, I know that people come up and they say, “Well, so what can I do? I’ve heard your message. What can I do?” And I think we ought to share some of those responses with our listeners.
Bill Nussey:
I think that’s a great idea, Sam. As our listeners know, we wrap up all of our most recent podcast interviews with four lightning round questions, one of which is what can individuals do to help us accelerate to work towards a clean energy future. We’ve gotten some great answers and we’re going to share them again with our listeners as a part of today’s podcast.
So much of the electricity industry revolves around policy and both the federal, state level, local policy, and sometimes it feels insurmountable. It feels like the politics and the inertia is just too much to overcome. But one of our guests, Anya Schoolmen of Solar United Neighbors has put together a nationwide advocacy group that goes door to door and make solar affordable and accessible to communities all over the country. And this is one of the best examples of a grassroots advocacy that is bringing solar across the country. So let’s take a quick listen to what Anya suggested we do.
Anya Schoolman:
What I would tell anybody is get involved. It doesn’t matter if you’re a kid or you’re so old you can’t walk anymore. There’s things that you could do. You could start a project, you could write your mayor, you could follow what’s going on at your public utility commission. Join Solar United Neighbors, and we have ways for everyone to get involved at any level of sophistication or time availability. You can host an open house at our national tour, send a postcard to your legislator, earn a sun patch for your scouting troop, or organize a solar co-op in your neighborhood.
Sam Easterby:
Anya has some wonderful for us and what it boils down to is just do it. Just step out there and get involved. Anya’s words are inspiring, and one of our guests is a world renowned expert in batteries. Dr. Jeff Chamberlain, and he was one of the founders of Volta Energy Technologies. Let’s listen to how he answered that question.
Dr. Jeff Chamberlain:
What I find myself going to is this. Get out there and drive an electric car. The more people that get out there and drive an electric car, the more people will, and I don’t mean go buy one, just go test drive an electric car. You will have a flash vision into the future and the impact that renewables can have. From that look into buying solar. Look into buying an electric car. There are companies now that will help you finance in a way that makes financial sense, regardless of where. Even in Chicago, we’re at a pretty far northern latitude, it actually is beginning to make financial sense to put solar on your rooftops in Chicago. So first and foremost, physically do something. Just do it, look into it. You’ll be surprised.
Bill Nussey:
One of our guests came to us all the way from Shanghai, China. An American, Andy Klump, who’s built a great business out there called Clean Energy Associates, which is basically helping companies and utilities all over the world build supply chains that involve China. And Andy’s got a unique global perspective, and I’m happy to share what he thought we should do as individuals to help accelerate the clean energy transition.
Andy Klump:
My answer is simple: create the demand. Whether it’s through the utility or other energy providers, search out ways for obtaining and purchasing clean energy. And we have seen the utilities change. They’re tuned towards solar. This trend is only going to happen if more and more consumers demand clean energy.
Sam Easterby:
Bill, one of our guests in the last year was Emily Morris, who is the founder of Emrgy. Emrgy is based here in Atlanta and they’re focused on distributed hydro. A fascinating area, and she’s done a wonderful job with that. And she had some fascinating things to tell us about how she suggests people can get involved.
Emily Morris:
I typically tell people to pick one thing and be really good at that one thing. You know, if recycling is your thing, then just focus on being the best at that that you can. If it’s lowering your overall consumption at home by modifying your HVAC patterns, or your lighting patterns, or things like that, do that and be really good at it. A lot of people don’t realize how energy consuming and carbon emitting transportation is. So I say, okay, if you want to really make a difference, do Skypes or webinars instead of flying all over the country, that would be a big way to reduce your impact and make a difference.
But I think that there’s way too much emphasis on trying to do all of these things and more. I don’t want to be a criminal if I use a plastic straw or something like that, knowing what went into it. And so I’d say, pick something that works, that integrates well in your lifestyle, and make that your thing and that way you can actually excel at it, watch your progress, and then hopefully leave this world a little better than when you got here.
Bill Nussey:
Sam, I really enjoyed the opportunity to interview Peter Heinselman, who is the CEO of CA BMC, which is one of the country’s largest electric membership corporations, co-ops as they’re called, where these are part of the delivery mechanism for electricity to more rural parts of the United States. He’s recently come on as CEO and had some great advice for all of us as we think about how we can make a difference as individuals in the clean energy transition.
Peter Heinselman:
I say to that Bill, is change the way you talk about clean energy, right? In a divisive world, a world of divisive politics that we live in, anything that seems political can turn off 50% of the population when you’re having a conversation. And so I like to talk about the apolitical nature of economic solar, economic electric vehicles, practical electric vehicles, and the great lifestyle that say electric vehicles bring you. Not having to go to a gas station, plug it into your home once every three days. It’s a cakewalk, right? So what I try to do when I talk about clean energy elements is just talk about how they just simply make great sense. Keep the politics out of it. Whatever one’s political persuasion would be is irrelevant. Talk about how great clean energy is for anybody in a very practical and economic sense.
Sam Easterby:
Bill, one of the most powerful set of interviews that you have done in the past year, I think, is with the folks from the Rocky Mountain Institute that are in Puerto Rico doing amazing work there in bringing local energy to the small communities in the mountains of Puerto Rico. And helping them to recover from just incredible challenges and changes to their lives. Roy Torbert from Rocky Mountain Institute shared with us his thoughts about how people can get involved.
Roy Torbert:
The terrifying thing actually is that there’s a million answers to this question and they all feel incredibly urgent. So you’ll find people who say you need to eat less meat. You need to make your home really efficient, weatherize your home, get better windows. You need to put solar panels, you need to go all the way off the grid. Those are all completely valid answers. I actually think the heart of this is we all need to raise our understanding of where our power comes from, where our food comes from, where all of our products come from, because we are consumers. In many respects, consumers have a power that they rarely understand until they all start moving together.
And if we all think of ourselves as this fragmented mass of like, well, okay, I’m going go vegan and that person’s going to do solar panels and therefore we’re in separate categories. I think we should all think of ourselves as an army that’s mobilizing towards a future that helps defeat this climate crisis. When mobilized, we can defeat almost anything. I tell people who think, oh, this is going to cost too much. What you’re actually telling me is that you doubt the power of human ingenuity. It’s only going to cost too much if human ingenuity fails at this immense challenge. So I think the exhortation here would be do all the things that feel right to you, but be open with everyone you can to say, we’re headed in this direction. Here’s the package of things I’ve chosen to do to try and reduce my ultimate impact on the planet. What are you doing, and how can we trade tips and share and become even greater in our own little battalion in this grand army?
Bill Nussey:
So these clips are all from interviews we’ve already done. And if you want to hear all the great words and insights and wisdom from these folks, go back to Apple podcasts or go to the Freeing Energy page listening to podcasts. And you can actually get the links from this one to all the ones we’ve mentioned today. So take a listen, let us know what you think, pass them along. But there’s a lot of great ideas here beyond what we can do as just individuals. So hope you’ll have a chance to listen to all of these great thinkers.
Sam Easterby:
Bill, we’ve heard some examples from our guests over the past year on just what individuals can do. I had a chance to catch up with a gentleman who has done some incredible work, and it’s an example, I think, of just what difference one person can make when they ask that question, what can I do to help? The gentleman I’m talking about is Bob Bresnahan and Bob is the founder of Renewable Taos.
Bill Nussey:
Bob had an amazing role in this, because he was a catalyst which helped drive Carson, Guzman, both of whom we’ve interviewed previously in these podcast series, their companies. And he brought together the people of Kit Carson across that area of New Mexico and created a movement that resulted in one of the most seminal changes in the electricity landscape of the United States. He was the first, Kit Carson, through large part of his efforts was the first co-op in the United States to break away from its parent. To set its destiny on its own, and to adopt real energy at a rate that no other co-op has attempted to do so far. So I’m really excited to hear your conversation with Bob.
Sam Easterby:
My guest today is Bob Bresnahan, co-founder of Renewable Taos in Taos, New Mexico. Bob, I’ve got to say that when the Freeing Energy Podcast first started just a little over a year ago, we set a goal to share the stories of what we call local energy champions. And we did have a chance to catch up early in the podcast series with two of the people you’ve worked with over the years. Luis Reyes from Kit Carson Electric Cooperative and Chris Riley from Guzman Energy.
But Bob, I wanted to hear from you. Because it seemed to me it was your initial work, from my perspective, one of the most important local energy stories of the last decade has unfolded there in your hometown of Taos, New Mexico. So Bob, welcome to the freeing energy podcast.
Bob Bresnahan:
Thanks Sam. I’m glad to be here.
Sam Easterby:
I understand that you’re not a native from Taos, that you moved there after some years with Nike. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to Taos.
Bob Bresnahan:
Well, I married Emily and Emily’s parents had moved to Taos in 1980. So I had retired from Nike in ’98 and we thought that we’d move up here to be close to her mother and provide support to her as she grew older.
Sam Easterby:
Tell me about your time at Nike.
Bob Bresnahan:
Well, I went to work at Nike. My initial job title was chief architect, which meant basically that I was director of technology planning for information technology in specific, but also looking out at the manufacturing and other kinds of things that involved IT in particular at Nike. I had a great job, I had a great job experience there. I really liked the company. During the last three years that I was there, Nike grew dramatically and I was program manager for the development of a just in time system for Nike apparel in the United States. It went from nothing, actually the back of a napkin at a lunch, to a $300 billion business in three years. I was responsible for all of the different computer applications that supported the business.
When we got the thing going, we did it with the help of McKinsey Corporation, and we had planning sessions where we identified all the obstacles to actually making things happen and with each obstacle we’d write it down on a yellow sticky and we’d put it up on a wall. Then we looked at each of the obstacles and assigned them to different people who were part of the team and we basically eliminated all of them. Frequently in these kinds of discussions, you come up with all the reasons you can’t do something. Well, we put those on the stickies and we just were able to resolve every one of them, and came up with a $300 million business.
Sam Easterby:
What I’d like to do with regard to the work there with Renewable Taos is, let me set the stage a little bit if I can and then let’s jump in to talk about that work. It’s 2010, you’re living and working there in Taos. Your local electric company is Kit Carson Electric Cooperative. Kit Carson at the time was buying its electricity from a utility called Tri-state.
Bob Bresnahan:
Correct.
Sam Easterby:
Then Kit Carson would distribute that electricity to its members, and as I understand it from my reading and research, it was during that time and just preceding that particular time that the rates from Tri-state to Kit Carson started going up, and up, and up a number of times in the preceding years.
Bob Bresnahan:
Tri-state became our sole supplier the year 2000 and they increases their rates about every 18 months from 2000 all the way through 2014. Kit Carson protested each of the rate increases, and finally in 2014 got two other New Mexico co-ops who agree to protest as well. And that caused a rate hearing in Santa Fe at the public regulatory commission. So it held up the implementation of the rate increase across the entire Tri-state system, which incorporated 44 other rural electric co-ops. And that put a lot of pressure on Tri-state to try to come to some kind of agreement with a Kit Carson
Sam Easterby:
During that time, as I understand it, most of the electricity that Tri-state was providing to cooperative members was generated through the use of fossil fuels.
Bob Bresnahan:
Principally coal. Mike McGinnis, who was president of Tri-state, called himself a coal man, proudly. Mike is a very congenial fellow. You can have a wonderful conversation with him even though that you disagree with them at the most fundamental levels on what I think is the most critical issue of our time, and that’s clean energy. Mike knew that I was a big proponent of clean energy and a big opponent of his hope to build a huge coal fired power plant in Kansas that would supply our energy going well into the future. So that failed, of course. I mean it was the last major coal generated power plant proposal that had any real legs. It was clearly uneconomical. It’s emissions would contribute and make worse our climate change problem.
Sam Easterby:
It was about that time that you reached out to the Kit Carson board and asked them for a little bit of time to explain a proposition to them.
Bob Bresnahan:
In 2012, we formed Renewable Taos, which as its central mission transition to 100% clean energy. We were very supportive of Kit Carson, because Kit Carson had the fourth highest solar penetration of any rural electric corp in the United States, and Kit Carson was hoping to add more local generation, but they were impeded from doing so by Tri-state. We talked to Kit Carson about our vision, which was providing 100% of our more or less daytime energy with solar, and the Kit Carson CEO, Luis Reyes, really liked our ideas. He saw the economic development potential for our community. Locally generated solar does not have transmission costs, particularly if you can export energy during the time that you are generating your own energy. And we see that as a real possibility going forward. But Tri-state just stood in the way of allowing that to happen.
It became necessary for us to break with them and try to find an alternative supplier. That supplier was Guzman Energy, who stepped in and paid for our exit fee from the 2040 contract that we had with Tri-state. So once we went independent, once we broke from Tri-state, we launched a solar project, a local generation project. By the end of this year, we’ll have 37 megawatts of solar rays on our grid. Those will provide the power for around 18,500 households in our area. We’ll pretty much be saturated with solar at that point. Our system will be producing more solar during peak generation than we consume, so we’ll kind of run into a natural barrier for the addition of more solar. Now if you’re able to store solar energy, we’ll be able to expand our grid a little bit more.
And on the other hand, if we’re able to increase our load during the daytime through demand management and through charging electric vehicles in particular, we’ll be able to build out more solar. But for us getting this Kit Carson solar project done is the end of phase one in the transition to 100% clean energy. Phase two is bringing in wind energy from Eastern New Mexico. Wind is nicely complimentary to solar, because it generates primarily in the evening when the sun is down. Renewable Taos is pushing really hard to encourage Kit Carson to acquire wind energy from Eastern New Mexico. There are a couple obstacles in the way, but they’re just, in my opinion, yellow stickies. We need to solve them and take them off the wall.
Sam Easterby:
As the story goes that I’ve heard this all started with a, what was initially about a 30 minute meeting that you had requested. It was 30 minutes on the calendar, and suddenly it turned into a three hour discussion, and all of this has come out of that.
Bob Bresnahan:
Well actually it began about a year earlier when a fellow named John Guzdorf, who was a energy consultant to the Canadian government who retired here in Taos, and I, started meeting weekly to discuss renewable energy and a renewable energy program in our community. Instead of jumping in and telling people what we thought should happen, or protesting, or any of the other variety of things that we could do, we decided to study the utility industry and clean energy, and figure out for ourselves what the benefits of transitioning to solar as a first stage would be. And we found that there’s important potential for economic development, local jobs, and the development of a reputation as being a clean community.
Sam Easterby:
Bob, one of the elements that came out of my readings from your early work with Kit Carson was that the Kit Carson board put a challenge to you and the folks at Renewable Taos. And that was to go out, reach out to the communities and get their input before they decided on which direction to take. That’s important in the local community piece. Tell us a little bit about that aspect of the work you’ve done.
Bob Bresnahan:
Well, Luis Reyes was very interested in solar, and wanted to expand local generation in particular, but our board is made up of primarily Republicans. Seven of the 11 members of the board are Republicans, and within that group there’s people who don’t like ideas about climate change. They had to be convinced of a number of things.
First and foremost was they had to be convinced that the community wanted us to move to clean energy. In order to do that, Renewable Taos drafted a resolution called The Joint Resolution for 100% Clean Energy, and we took it around to each town and county, and other important institutions in the Kit Carson service area, and placed it before their boards or their councils and got a pass. Every single one of the towns all have passed the Joint Resolution for Renewable Energy. Getting it passed took away any question about what the public wanted.
Sam Easterby:
Fascinating background. So you took a very different approach than we oftentimes hear or see in the press. You took more of a data driven approach to addressing this issue and the solutions.
Bob Bresnahan:
I used my business experience to really seriously think out how we could make it happen. We didn’t want to be advocates for an ideal solution. We wanted to be promoters of a practical solution. That’s, I think, a fairly accurate summary. You know, I’d been up protester as a young man about the Vietnam war and civil rights, but my days of marching are pretty much over. I really learned a lot in my business career about making big projects take place. I tried to use that experience in promoting clean energy in our community.
Sam Easterby:
So you coming out of an IT background, were you surprised by the rate of adoption of new technologies? Or the innovation being done within the utility business, versus, say, the private sector?
Bob Bresnahan:
Well, the utility industry is pretty hidebound. They’re resistant to change. They had done things one way for a hundred years and the idea of distributed energy and rooftops and big solar arrays or wind arrays connecting directly to the grid kind of ran against the grain in the utility industry. These new technologies, initially were resisted on the ground that they were more expensive. But right now wind energy costs about a third or even less of the cost of natural gas, for example. We can get wind energy here in Taos for 1.5 cents a kilowatt hour. The price of wind energy has been reduced by 50% every three and a half years for the last 20 years. If it is reduced by 50% every three and a half years over the next decade, that means that at the end of the ’20s, wind energy is going to cost about $0.0075 per kilowatt hour.
Sam Easterby:
And so once you strip out some of the distribution costs, if you apply that in a local distributed energy setting, you’ve got a much, much more cost effective energy provided to local people.
Bob Bresnahan:
Right now it costs about a third or a quarter of what new gas or coal would cost. By the end of the ’20s it’ll cost about a 12th and it’ll be clean. It has a couple important environmental impacts that need to be addressed, but by and large we won’t be burning things and emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It is kind of the bottom tier of the solution to climate change.
Sam Easterby:
You guys have made amazing progress with Kit Carson, with Guzman Energy, with Renewable Taos. How do things like batteries and say electric vehicles fit into your thinking about the future there?
Bob Bresnahan:
Well, we said that we wanted to do 100% of all energy from clean emission free resources and our goal is that we get there by 2028. We think we can get there for all energy uses by about 80% by 2025. More than 50% of the emissions in our service area come from transportation. We want to stop burning things for heat and power and we think we can do that by 2028 in our region through the use of electricity from wind and from solar. Storage will play a part, but I think more importantly we’re going to need to upgrade the transmission grid so that when the sun isn’t shining in Taos, which is 30 days a year or something like that, we’ll be able to get solar energy from North Dakota.
We have 330 days of sun a year. I know in Cleveland, Ohio for example, where I lived for a short period of time, they have about a hundred sunny days a year or 110 sunny days a year. We should be providing them with solar energy during the time that it’s not available back East. So that means that we have to upgrade the national grid in order for the entire country to have her a green new deal solution of 100% clean energy by 2030.
Sam Easterby:
So I have a final question for you today, and this is one that Bob, we get asked all the time, is that once they can hear the story about what we’re pursuing, what we’re looking for in the clean local energy, they ask, what can I do to help accelerate that timeline? To help make that happen a little bit faster, the move to a clean energy future? How do you respond to that question?
Bob Bresnahan:
It’s really simple, I think. And that is that we need to stop burning things.
Sam Easterby:
Now, I burn grits occasionally in the pot on the stove.
Bob Bresnahan:
Yeah. Yeah. We can get by with a little bit of that. But we need to stop burning gasoline to power our vehicles. We need to stop burning coal for our electricity grid. We need to stop burning natural gas for the electrical grid and for heating our homes, and cooling our homes, and we need to stop using propane. And in my home I’ve even stopped burning wood because I know that the wood is really not a renewable resource in our world.
You may have noticed the fires in Australia, they’re sweeping across Australia. Or the fires that swept across Northern California. If we continue to warm our planet as we have done over the last period of time, forests like the ones that we have here in Taos are not going to exist. We’re going to have a climate like the Sonoran Desert. Mainly, we’ve got to get rid of the fossil fuels. That’s number one. And we do that by transitioning to electric vehicles, and by using air and ground source pumps to heat and cool our homes.
Sam Easterby:
Bob, this has been a fascinating discussion for me and I hope so for our listeners as well. And we would encourage people to look into Renewable Taos, and the work you’re doing there along with Kit Carson and Guzman Energy. And I really, really appreciate your time today and joining us on the Freeing Energy Podcast.
Bob Bresnahan:
Thanks so much Sam.
Bill Nussey:
As we wrap up this podcast, it’s been pretty mind opening and inspiring to think about all these leaders sharing with us what they’re doing, what they recommend that we can do. Together, we and many others can really drive this clean energy transition much faster because it needs to be faster and there’s really seven areas. I think if you sum all this up where people can as individuals make a difference, and as Robert Kennedy said together those differences will change the world. Just a quick review. There’s the first is advocacy what Anya schoolmen and Bob are talking about. Getting out there and just changing the policies, changing people’s perspective of policies, having them reach out to their local decision makers. And to some degree that’s like the second which is voters. In many parts of the country, individuals as citizens can vote for the public utility commission, which oversees the utility.
They can write letters, they can make calls. Heck, they can even go down to a public utility or public service commission. They’re open in most places and eyeopening. You can invest, do this with some caution and it’s always dicey to get into this area, but if you are an angel investor or just a public stock market investor with your pension fund, there’s some really interesting investments emerging on both the private and the public fronts. As consumers, this is an area that people don’t really think about, but the economies of volume, the more solar cells, the more solar panels, the more electric vehicles, the more batteries that get made, the cheaper the next ones become. So to the extent that you want to make a difference today, buy an electric vehicle, buy solar panels, put them on your roof, put them on your building. Every incremental purchase has a small effect of making the next set even cheaper.
I love that fact that we can all come together and essentially lower the price collectively. And then there’s consumers. If you are looking at two different companies to maybe buy a similar product from, take a look at what their clean energy policies are. Are they adopting solar and wind aggressively? Are they not paying any attention to it all? And if you let them know that the reason you want to buy from them is because they have a clean energy policy, they’ll listen and they’ll adopt clean energy faster themselves.
And last and honestly, the reason the Freeing Energy Project was started was to be knowledgeable, to understand this incredibly complex industry. To a degree that’s not to live in it, not to work in it, but just to understand the push and pull so that when you’re in conversations with people, you can say, listen, solar does make sense. Batteries do make sense. Yes, we can get to a clean energy grid. The opinions you have as a voter, as a consumer, as an investor, they matter, and to help just get more people involved with the local clean energy movement.
Sam Easterby:
Bill, I found this to be a very useful conversation and it seems to me this is why we created the Freeing Energy Project.
Bill Nussey:
Well, thanks again for all of our esteemed guests for once again sharing their words with our audience, and hopefully this will be the start of many opportunities for us to get people, our listeners and others on board. Collectively, as Robert Kennedy suggested, so we can go change the world.
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