#HeroesofFreeingEnergy: Jorge Elizondo

“I started a small wind turbine company in Mexico. And then in 2010, we discovered that solar panels were just getting so cheap that small wind turbines were a hard sell. So I got into MIT, moved from Mexico to the U.S., and completed my PhD on the question, ‘If you could build the grid again, how would you build it?’

#HeroesofFreeingEnergy: Chris Riley

“I grew up in a small town in central Utah that is very much a rural coal mining community. My father is a third-generation coal miner. My grandfather was a lifetime coal miner and his grandfather was a lifetime coal miner, all in the West around Wyoming and Utah.”

#HeroesofFreeingEnergy: Anya Schoolman

Anya Schoolman speaking at a local event about solar power

“It really started out innocently. Walter and Diego saw ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ and they came back saying, ‘We can’t wait for the government. The government’s never going to solve our problems. We need to do something today. Let’s go solar.’”

#HeroesofFreeingEnergy: Wendy Philleo

“Our theory of change is that Americans need to know that there are solutions out there. We are telling a new energy narrative around economic prosperity, around energy freedom, around resiliency and innovation. We’re trying to tell that new energy story. “

#HeroesofFreeingEnergy: John Farrell

John Farrell Freeing Energy Hero

“We think that energy democracy means figuring out how to create the rules of a system so that people can have that decision-making power. The biggest problem about monopoly utilities is that they have too much political power to write the rules of the system in which they operate.” John Farrell of the Institute for Local Self Reliance